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LONDON DAYS 




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LONDON DAYS 



A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES 



BY 



ARTHUR WARREN 



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BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1920 



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Copyright, 1920, 
By Arthur Warren. 



All rights reserved 
Published September, 1920 



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Nortoooli ifresB 

Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Gushing Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. 



OCT - 1 1920 
©C!,A576685 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER FAQB 

I First Glimpses of London .... 1 

II London in the Late Seventies ... 9 

III A Norman Interlude 18 

IV I Take the Plunge 28 

V Browning and Moscheles 42 

VI Patti 57 

VII John Stuart Blackie 79 

VIII Lord Kelvin 96 

IX Tennyson 114 

X Gladstone 138 

XI Whistler 157 

XII Henry Drummond 170 

XIII Sir Henry Irving 185 

XIV Henry M. Stanley 205 

XV George Meredith 222 

XVI Parnell 240 

XVII "Le Bra v' General" 260 

Index 275 



LONDON DAYS 

CHAPTER I 

FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON 

One day at dusk, in the autumn of 1878, when I 
was eighteen, I arrived at the heart of the world. 

I was fresh from New England, and had left 
Boston, my native city, seventeen days before, em- 
barking at New York on the Anchor liner Alsatia 
three days later; disembarking at Tilbury after a 
turbulent voyage that lasted two weeks to the 
hour. What was left of me passed from the Fen- 
church Street Station into Leadenhall Street, the 
least of three passengers in a four-wheeled cab. 
Through the cab windows, and the ghost of fog 
which simmered over gas lamps, flashed glimpses of 
the city, splashes of light on the pavements illumin- 
ated windows bound in brass, cumbrous drays and 
'busses, and great grey horses, and glistening pubs. 
The air was heavy with smoke. I heard the tramp 
of thousands and thousands of persons, all home- 
ward bound, and all wearing top hats. And, of all 
names, there at the right on a clothier's sign, the 
enamelled legend: "Dombey and Son!" My head 
was packed with Dickens, and in a pocket was a 
linen-backed map. 



2 LONDON DAYS 

In one way and another, by books and maps and 
imagination, I was already on familiar terms with 
the world-city which I had never seen. I had read 
it up, studied it, knew intricate maps of it, and 
stories of its traditions. At a time when the youth 
of my country and generation were expected to 
follow Horace Greeley's advice, " Go West and grow 
up with the country" — or, as interpreted by the 
cynics, "Go West and start a graveyard" — I made 
a chance to go East across the Atlantic. And I 
went. So I beheld the Old World. But I had 
chances enough, that is, I made them, to see the 
New World later. And I saw it. History in the 
making is interesting, — sometimes, and if you 
survive. History already made and rounded and 
woven into legend, the scenes among which men 
have lived and wrought through centuries, shaping 
the rich past on which we build the present, hold a 
fascination which did not seem to come to me from 
regions where man was pioneering. London was 
the magnet that first drew me. And as the cab 
turned south from Leadenhall Street and moved 
slowly along the noisy streams of traffic, I exclaimed 
presently, to the disappointment of my companions 
who knew the town and were prepared to point out 
its places of celebrity : 

"London Bridge at last !" 

"At last.'^" said they. "Why, this is quick work 
for the time of day. How many minutes ? " 

"But I 've been eighteen years on the way," said I. 

I managed to keep awake and hungry till we got 
to the Wiltshire Road in Brixton, where my guides 



FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON 3 

from Fenchurch Street were staying. The stagger 
and strain of the sea voyage had left me stupidly 
weary, so that as soon as possible after dinner I 
went to bed. Although I stayed three weeks in 
that house, all recollection of a dining room has 
vanished. That may be attributed to the zeal of 
youth and its indifference to the art of dining, an 
art acquired speedily enough later on. But never 
in the subsequent years have I been able to revive 
a single memory of that Brixton house. And the 
only recollection of the first three weeks in England 
is that on the first morning, at an oflSce in the City, 
I was violently seasick. 

Atlantic passengers who begin their voyaging 
nowadays in luxuriously fitted vessels of fifty thou- 
sand tons, and coddled within an inch of their lives, 
lack the remotest notion of the sea travel of forty 
years ago. The Alsatia, of the Anchor Line, was 
one of the largest and finest ships afloat in 1878. 
She had a single smokestack and a single screw, no 
covered deck for passengers, no barber shop, no 
electric lights, not even an electric bell. Deck 
chairs were unknown, but later you could buy them 
ashore and store them in the Company's baggage 
room against your return. No meal could be served 
on deck without the permission of the captain. The 
first mate was a surly ass who threatened passengers 
with irons if he caught them infringing some stupid 
rule, long since abolished ; and although the steamer 
was fairly new she belonged to the age when seamen 
hated fresh air in a hull, and the smells from her 
bilges would have asphyxiated an ox. She was one 



4 LONDON DAYS 

tenth the size of the big liners of to-day, five thousand 
tons being registered to her credit in the advertise- 
ments where she was described as "a giant." She 
was a worthy sea craft, but she hopped, skipped, and 
jumped all the way from New York to London, used 
fourteen days in getting there, ten being made 
against head gales and heavy seas, one of which 
threw a sailor from the maintop to the deck, killing 
him, and sweeping overboard two hundred sheep 
which we carried on the foredeck. Nearly all liners 
in those days carried sail and were square-rigged. 
Their canvas was stained with soot and smoke, but 
it had a steadying effect on the ship when spread 
to a favouring quarter. Whether the Alsatia car- 
ried sail I never knew for I was ten days helpless 
and agonised in my cabin, and for three days more 
the mastheads seemed to scrape the scudding clouds 
with a fore-and-aft motion that tore your eyes if 
you looked skyward. It was only after we had 
passed well up Channel, near Dover, that the wind 
eased and we could venture on deck without clinging 
to life lines. 

This horror of seasickness was as unexpected as 
it was distressing, for, if I had not been brought up 
on the sea, I had been accustomed to it long enough, 
and had sailed an eighteen-foot catboat up and down 
Massachusetts Bay, where there is rough water 
much of the time and scope for seamanlike work 
all the time. Whether on long rollers, or on choppy 
water, I had never been troubled by the sea's motion 
until the Alsatia tumbled across the Atlantic, and 
then it was my head that bore distress, and not my 



FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON 5 

centreboard. It seemed as if the fragment of brain 
still remaining in me broke loose and rattled from 
skull to toes, bounding back with a hideous roar and 
horrid pressure which found no relief till we got into 
quiet water. I vowed never to go to sea again. 
Since then I have made more than fifty voyages on 
the North Atlantic alone. 

There was a man aboard who had a salty sailor's 
fondness for a howling sea, and we became amazing 
friendly. And he was amazing fat, so that he took 
very short steps. As I was no thicker than a lath, 
and six-feet-an-inch-and-a-half tall, there was con- 
trast enough as he paddled alongside me. Creep- 
ing from the hated stateroom where ten nearly food- 
less and acutely torturing days had been passed in 
a damp melancholy, I saw a dozen or fifteen pas- 
sengers — our full strength — seated at a long table 
on the starboard side of the saloon, listening to Mr. 
Pickwick reading "Othello." He was as round as 
Pickwick, not quite so cherubic as Phiz's immortal 
drawing, and minus the spectacles. In the tossing 
night, when we had forgotten that any portion of 
the universe was ever still, he was declaiming 
Othello's speech to the Senate. 

The figure and the fact were incongruous, but the 
effect of the declamation was not. He read all the 
tragedy, barring a few cuts. I supposed him a 
comic actor with an ambition for tragic parts. Some 
sailors staring through a deck light took him for a 
"sky pilot" reading the burial service for their 
fellow, but thought him over-long about it. His 
name was Henry Murray. He was a Scotsman 



6 LONDON DAYS 

retired from the Chinese trade. He was also a 
Free Mason, Past District Grand Master for China. 
He was returning to England with the intention of 
becoming a public reader. He intended even to 
become an actor of Falstaff and he had long been 
a capable amateur. His father had been a famous 
actor in Edinburgh; his brother commanded the 
Guion liner Arizona, and later, the Alaska. 

Henry Murray was a good judge of acting. But 
his fondness for acting was fatal to his fortunes and 
his life. The first he spent in efforts to establish 
himself ; the second he wore out in disappointment 
over the failure of his plans. I remember him with 
genuine affection, because he was the first to open 
to me any door in the mighty and mysterious world 
of London. 

Plans had no place in my baggage, at least no 
plans requiring space. I had practically worked my 
way to London where I was to join the staff of an 
American engineering concern who were introducing 
an invention. Though lacking years I had sufficient 
application, and I had learned enough of the business 
to justify my appointment. That, in fact, had been 
my purpose, and I worked hard to achieve it and 
uphold it. But I wanted to write. And, being in 
London, why not write about London ? I knew that 
Mrs. Glasse's recipe for cooking hare had begun, 
"First catch your hare", and so the prescription for 
my own case ran, " First learn your London." Mean- 
time I had my vocation to lean on. During the 
business hours of four years I ran with my vocation, 
and, out of business hours, followed my hobby. 



FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON 7 

Old Mother London gave me the key to her 
streets, and diligently I used it. Into every old 
church I wandered, and into every old building that 
had given shelter to Fame when she touched a poet, 
a philosopher, a painter, a literary man, a tragedian, 
a soldier, sailor, or a king. And I knew the burial 
places of those she cherished, and those she flouted, 
or those she flirted with, no less than the living 
places of those who still pursued her on any of the 
grey mornings in which I rambled. They became 
as familiar to me as any 'bus line, and I became a 
walking directory to the odd corners where she had 
preened her feathers for an hour or for a space of 
years. I became saturated with her legends, and 
occasionally an arbiter in cases of suspected masonry 
whose identity rumour and record had disputed or 
concealed. That was one form of amusement. The 
play was another. 

I was at home in London from the moment of 
my arrival at Fenchurch Street. It had been a far 
cry to Fenchurch Street, and when a lad made it in 
company with a rotund gentleman of Pickwickian 
build, the chances were sure to be amusing. After 
trying two or tliree boarding houses, I settled in 
chambers just out of Queen Square in Bloomsbury. 
Murray was in apartments half a mile away, in 
Marchmont Street. Marchmont Street was shabby 
in those days, whatever it may be now. On the 
west side of it, over a tailor's shop kept by her 
husband, was the shabby, but clean and shining 
house of Mrs. Floyth, a melancholy woman who had 
been maid or housekeeper to John Stuart Mill when 



8 LONDON DAYS 

the manuscript of Carlyle's "French Revolution'* 
was burned to light the fires ! I have always won- 
dered if the old lady herself were responsible for that 
conflagration. It might have accounted for her 
settled melancholy. 

My chambers near Queen Square were in a spa- 
cious old house which was panelled and carved from 
roof to entrance hall. There soon began to meet 
here, once or twice a month, a congenial group, 
smoking churchwarden pipes. It called itself the 
"Quill Club ", talked politics, the drama, and books, 
and the members disagreed as heartily as any 
human beings could on all the topics of life. 

There would have been no interest in listening to 
another fellow's talk had you been in agreement 
with him. There were but two rules in the Club : 
the first that a man should say what he thought; 
the second — give his reasons for thinking so. When 
a man failed to sustain his opinion by his reasons he 
paid for the tobacco. The Quills, as may be sup- 
posed, were chiefly of a trade, quill drivers. But 
they were not entirely so: one was "by way of 
being" an artist, another was a solicitor, a third 
was inclined to surgery, a fourth made musical 
boxes, the fifth was a dentist, and the others pursued 
literature, at greater or smaller distances, and inci- 
dentally contributed small feed to the presses in 
Fleet Street, or elsewhere. Of a dozen, ten are 
dead. Some made goals, some fell by the way. 
But they all enjoyed life and work, for all were 
young. And sometimes they could pay their bills. 



CHAPTER II 

LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES 

London was a more livable place in the late 
seventies than it is now, or so it seems to me, as it 
seems to many others who knew the town in that 
earlier time. There were not so many means for 
getting everywhere as there are now, and yet we 
got everywhere, — everywhere, that is, that we 
wished to go. We were not in a hurry then, and 
there was more consideration for the old and the 
lame than there is now. Now there is none at all 
in the streets or under them. The electric age was 
prophesied, but nothing more. Nobody in England 
believed in prophecies. There were arc lights on 
Holborn Viaduct and the Thames Embankment, 
nowhere else, but the incandescent lamp had not 
appeared. There was nothing electrical, in our 
modern sense, except the telegraph. The telephone 
was unknown. It is almost unknown to-day, if 
London's use of it be compared with New York's. 
There was no electric traction, and the petrol age 
was nearly a quarter of a century distant. But for 
all these drawbacks, as I daresay they may be 
regarded by the youth of the present hour, London 
was the most livable place in the world, if you 
loved cities ; it had a charm, a fascination all its own. 



10 LONDON DAYS 

That charm is not to be described. How can it 
be described, any more than the charm of a charming 
woman? You are conscious of it, you know that 
there is nothing Hke it, you are sorry for those who 
must Hve elsewhere and cannot come under its spell ; 
they have missed that much out of life. You ex- 
perience a certain largeness of heart, and would 
like to give everybody a June in London, but reluc- 
tantly acknowledge that every one must take the 
will for the deed. 

But if you attempt to analyse London it will 
baffle your effort. It is at once so splendid and so 
mean, so spacious and so meagre, so beautiful and 
so ugly, so noisy and so quiet, so restless and restful, 
that the farther you go the more puzzled you be- 
come, unless having begun by questioning it you 
end by accepting. Take it in its own way and you 
will see that it is in itself a problem that cannot be 
solved by a study of weeks or months ; it is a study 
for a lifetime, for many lifetimes. For instance : 
architecturally it is too often saddening and mean. 

Some one will fly into a rage when he reads the 
preceding sentence. He will ask resentfully if I 
think Westminster Abbey, the Parliament Buildings, 
St. Paul's Cathedral sad, or mean, or shabby. Of 
course I do not. Their nobility and beauty almost 
redeem the hundreds of square miles of common- 
place and melancholy builders' work that encumbers 
London. Yet how the mean shops press upon St. 
Paul's and shut it in ! Could anything be uglier 
than the National Gallery? Could any important 
thoroughfare be more conducive to depression of 



LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES 11 

spirits than Victoria Street ? It 's not the old London 
that is architecturally ugly and mean ; it is the mod- 
ern London, and usually the more modern the greater 
the affliction to the eye. Somebody said, I think it 
was Schelling, "Architecture is frozen music.'* 
Would not anybody say that the Methodist moun- 
tain in Westminster is frozen pudding ? 

London in the late seventies was architecturally 
less saddening than now, because less that was pre- 
tentious and defiant of good taste had been under- 
taken. Its public buildings of later date are the 
worst in Europe, excepting those that have arisen 
in Germany. Squat, heavy, out of proportion, lack- 
ing in dignity, in beauty, they seem to have been 
erected for the purpose of proving that in architec- 
ture the modern Briton will neither imitate nor 
aspire. *'The finest site in Europe" is almost the 
meanest sight. The marvel is that a capital and a 
country having so many fine models of earlier date 
do not repeat them, improve upon them, or attempt 
even a finer taste. The opportunities have been 
unrivalled, but about the achievements the less said 
the better. Acres of slums have been swept away to 
be superseded by miles of masonry which serve 
mainly to prevent an acquaintance with good taste. 
What public "improvement" could be shabbier 
than Shaftsbury Avenue, meaner than newer White- 
hall, or more commonplace than Kingsway and 
Aldwych.?^ What department of a Government 
could have blocked a vista so remorselessly as the 
Admiralty has done, or have betrayed a contempt 
for beauty more disheartening than the County 



n LONDON DAYS 

Council has shown in its latest horror at Westminster 
Bridge ? 

The majestic beauties of London seem to have 
developed by accident rather than by design. The 
view down Waterloo Place to the Abbey and the 
Victoria Tower and the view eastward from the 
Serpentine Bridge in Hyde Park have certainly done 
so. The view down the river from Waterloo Bridge, 
or Westminster, was never planned ; it grew slowly, 
being first blessed by every natural advantage that 
a patient Providence could bestow. In its buildings 
of a private character, its domestic architecture, 
London still has much to seek; monotony has been 
the rule, but the style has not deteriorated. In 
some respects and localities it has much improved ; 
there is evidence that imagination has been allowed 
to exercise itself, that all house owners do not, in 
these times, think alike, and are not content with 
dwellings which, outwardly at least, seem, class by 
class, to have been run from one mould. Individual- 
ity begins to express itself as if, at last, some Lon- 
doners were beginning to lose their fear of becoming 
conspicuous. An advance in taste has run con- 
currently with the decline of the top hat and frock 
coat. 

But the interiors of English buildings of all kinds, 
public as well as private, churches as well as theatres, 
offices no less than railway stations, clubs, homes, 
hotels, all are draughty, as lacking in warmth as 
they were when I first knew them. The exceptions 
are so few that they are advertised. Central heat- 
ing is still regarded as a fad, constant hot water is a 



LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES 13 

novelty ; there is a superstitious regard for cold air 
as pure air, and a fear of warm air as impure. But 
the worst cold is that of dampness, and many houses 
are never dry. Mildew is common in their closets, 
chill in the bedrooms, and their halls are rheumatic. 
Rheumatism, and its allies lumbago, influenza, pneu- 
monia, and consumption are the customary ills. 
When the Briton is cold indoors he goes out for a 
walk and warms his blood. The theory is that 
artificial warmth is unhealthf ul ; the truth is that it 
is an expense to which the Briton objects, and that 
he has not learned how to warm his house. The 
tough survive. The delicate, the aged, the invalid, 
or the sedentary take their chances, and while they 
live do so with an unbelievable lack of comfort. 
Consequently the English complain of cold when the 
American would think the temperature moderate; 
but the American uses heat to keep his house dry as 
well as warm. He often overdoes it ; he often goes 
as far in one direction as the Briton in the other. 
But an English house warmed in the American way, 
not necessarily to the usual American degree, is 
always appreciated by the Briton, although he may 
be far from understanding the reason of his content. 
London had a charm in the late seventies that it 
lost when the Twentieth Century was still young, — 
the charm of leisure. The internal-combustion en- 
gine drove leisure from the land. The old two-horse 
'bus was a leisurely thing. Even the four-horse 
express 'busses that plied between the Swan at 
Clapham to Gracechurch Street, and similar urban 
and suburban centres, were leisurely enough, com- 



14 LONDON DAYS 

pared with the electric trains and motor 'busses that 
now rush the city man to and fro. They were not 
comfortable, those horse-drawn caravans with their 
knifeboard roofs and perilous scaling ladders, that 
is, they were not comfortable excepting on the box 
seats to which every man's ambition soared. There, 
sheltered by great leathery aprons, the lucky pas- 
senger braved the weather, beheld the passing world, 
and exchanged small talk with the driver who con- 
descended affably to discourse, with his "regulars", 
the news of the day. The smart hansom disappeared 
long ago. Smart as it was it was leisurely compared 
with the flashing taxi and motor which have super- 
seded ''London's gondola", as Disraeli called it. 
And, Heaven knows, the sulphurous underground 
was leisurely beyond words. 

Everybody rushes now. London has no more 
time to spare than New York has. It seems a dream 
that, when I first entered an English train, the 
custom was for the railway guards to call, "Take 
your time, take your time!" But that was their 
call forty years ago. 

Gradually the street cries have lessened in variety, 
in character, and in interest. The simple trades that 
announced their wares by a snatch of something 
that passed for song have disappeared one by one. 
Even the muffin man is vocal no longer, and his bell 
is silent. Whatever may have caused the other 
merchants of the curb to vanish, the war and short 
rations removed the muffin man. He was almost 
the last, perhaps actually the last of the creatures who 
gave to London streets an old-world sound or savour. 



LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES 15 

When the late seventies were still on the calendar, 
and for long after, the silk hat was an unrelenting 
tyrant, and in the City, among stockbrokers, it bore 
a special gloss. Every male above the age and status 
of an office boy or a labouring man wore a silk hat. 
Without that ugly and inconvenient headgear you 
would not call upon your solicitor, or appear at your 
banker's, or negotiate a contract, much less intrude 
upon an official person. The silk hat was a sign of 
respectability. In the House of Commons it seemed 
a symbol of the majesty of the British Constitution. 
There, to this day, the head must be covered, as if 
the members were in a synagogue. In summer time 
straw hats were unknown, excepting for the sex that 
was gentler then, and invariably the sex wore furs 
with its straws. A man who ventured in a straw 
hat incurred the risk of obloquy. At any rate, he 
was as marked and ridiculous an object as Jonas 
Hanway when, in an earlier century, he raised an 
umbrella in Oxford Street. 

Temple Bar was standing where Fleet Street joins 
the Strand ; the new Law Courts which now over- 
look its site were in process of construction ; the 
Griffin was undreamed of. Northumberland Avenue 
had been opened but was incomplete. The modern 
hotels had yet to be promoted. The Grand was the 
first of these, but its fortunes were thought hazard- 
ous. There was no Metropole, or Victoria, although 
their walls were going up. Rimmel's perfumery 
warehouse stood where the Savoy is now, and that 
sordid adventurer Hobbs (or was it Jabez Balfour ?) 
had not preempted the site of the Cecil which was 



16 LONDON DAYS 

then covered with lodging houses, chambers, and 
private hotels. There was no Carlton, no Ritz, 
no Waldorf; even the Great Central was not in 
being, and the only restaurants of consequence were 
the Criterion, St. James', Gatti's old Adelaide Gal- 
lery, half its present size, the Cafe Royal, Very's, 
and the stufify predecessor of the present Holborn. 

The first run of "Pinafore" had not ended, the 
revival of Old Drury's prosperous days had not 
begun; "Our Boys" had been running for nearly 
five thousand nights at the Vaudeville ; Sothern was 
making his last appearances in the last season of the 
unremodelled Haymarket; there was the Alhambra 
but no Empire, no Hippodrome, no Coliseum; St. 
James' Hall, but no Queen's Hall ; the Albert Hall 
was mostly empty, the old-style music halls were 
mostly full; Mr. Pinero was acting small parts in 
Irving's company and had not written so much as 
the scenario of a one-act play ; Henry Arthur Jones 
had not been heard of ; Bernard Shaw was unknown, 
Adelaide Neilson was at the height of her brief 
career, Forbes Robertson had begun his, and Buck- 
stone's days were ending. The era of the Kendals 
and John Hare at the St. James' was yet to come, 
but the happy reign of the Bancrofts, at the old 
Prince of Wales', behind the Tottenham Court Road, 
where the Scala now stands, had yet to close. 

George Meredith was not only "caviare to the 
general" but "the general" were a little shocked 
when they learned that he was still a reader for a 
publishing house and a writer when he had the time. 
"The general" found delight in the fiction of Miss 



LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES 17 

Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, and, of course, 
Ouida, as they would delight now if these ladies 
were spinning copy ; Kipling was at school, and 
Barrie dreaming in the north. We had William 
Black and Walter Besant and James Rice, but no 
Society of Authors, and no literary knights. If the 
world is small now it was very large then, but 
"sausage and mashed" were cheap at the top of 
London Bridge, threepence for a pair of hulking 
sausages and a liberal plate of mashed potato, a 
penny more for a great hunk of bread, and tu'ppence 
more for half a tankard of beer. 

A certain splendid swagger departed from London 
Streets when the regiments quartered in town 
abandoned their gorgeous uniforms and dressed 
less like magnificos and more like fighting men. 
They were fighting men though, they and their suc- 
cessors who held back the outnumbering German rush 
from the Channel ports of France in 1914, as all the 
world knows, and none know better than the Huns. 
But they were dandies too, those earlier men, and 
they filled the eye. Their saucy scarlet, short- 
waisted jackets, their jaunty fatigue caps, their 
tight trousers with broad red stripes, on shapely 
legs which seemed tremendous in length, were at 
once the admiration of nursemaids and the envy 
of small boys, lending, as they did, colour and form 
to these dun streets. Will the glorious colossi who 
strode thus habited be seen again this side of Charon's 
ferry ; or will their successors lead the simple life 
in khaki and puttees ? 



CHAPTER III 

A NORMAN INTERLUDE 

After a winter in London I went to Paris for a 
part of the spring, stopping on the way a day in 
Rochester (I had the Dickens fever then), and 
another day in Canterbury for the Cathedral's sake. 
A night boat, the ancient Wave, or the antediluvian 
Foam, took me to Calais, and through some delay 
on the line there was a wait of hours. But the night 
was fine, and I spent it roaming through and beyond 
the old town, getting forty winks afterward in the 
station, and a breakfast of hot chocolate and bread 
at a place facing the harbour where I watched the 
fishing boats put out on a convenient tide. In 
Paris I knew only one person, an American friend 
who was studying art, taking his lessons at Julian's, 
and slowly, yet certainly, learning that art was not 
for him. He introduced me to a lot of men who 
knew their way about, and soon I knew my way 
about as well as they did, possibly, in some direc- 
tions, a little better, for, with one or two exceptions, 
I cannot remember any who were gifted with a 
faculty for anything but good-fellowship and for 
spending their allowances from home. They knew 
the jargon of the studios, but as Paris seemed full 



A NORMAN INTERLUDE 19 

of men who could paint as well as they and were 
threatening to do it, the charming group dissolved 
in a year or two, one after another, returning to 
their homes in various parts of the world. Not one 
that I know of is living now, and nearly all whom I 
could trace in later years had gone into trade, and 
flourished there. 

But my acquaintance with Paris had begun. It 
was to be extended in subsequent years. What 
chiefly remains in my recollection concerning those 
early days is that for the first time I had the con- 
sciousness of being in a foreign country. I never 
had that in England, no, not for a minute, and no 
one, then or since, ever tried to make me feel it 
there. Of course, part of the difference was due to 
language, but not all the difference. There were 
subtle differences in France, and some plain, out- 
standing ones. The English are kindly people, 
hospitable, and, if I must say so — and I think I 
must, having lived through three years of the great 
war with them, to say nothing of many preceding 
years — they are naive. The Englishman, if he 
liked you, took you to his home, but he said that 
the Frenchman did not. But he did, I found. And 
I found that the Frenchman, if less kindly, was more 
polite. The Frenchman had either clearer ideas or 
none at all about other nationalities ; the English- 
man — but really, these reflections do not belong 
in this book, but in another, if anywhere. I will 
not prolong them here, but say only that I was in 
Paris fairly often after that first visit and that I 
liked it the more the more I knew it. 



20 LONDON DAYS 

But I am forgetting my friend Monsieur Raoul 
de St. Ange. I would not willingly forget my friend 
St. Ange. In fact, I could not forget him. He was a 
delightful man of fifty or thereabouts, a dear and 
gracious person. I had met him in London where 
he was giving lessons in French, and trying to make 
a French weekly paper pay its way and earn him 
something over. He was of Norman birth, and 
had lived fairly well in Paris up to the time of the 
Commune, when he had been ruined. He emigrated 
to London. He had a wife and two small sons. The 
boys were about ten and twelve respectively. This 
little family lived in a little house at Shepherd's 
Bush. The house was very simple, but it was as 
neat as wax. I used to help St. Ange a little with 
the English section of his paper, and in return he 
gave me lessons in French. 

One day he said to me : "I must go to Normandy ; 
a week there. It will give me the greatest pleasure 
if you come." And so I arranged to meet him at 
Amiens on my return from Paris. He had some 
family affairs to settle, something to do with the 
children, and a bit of property that had been left 
in trust for them. In Normandy we would see some 
of his people, a bit of France from the inside not the 
outside. I jumped at the chance. We met at 
Amiens, and explored the Cathedral before doing 
anything else. He knew somebody there, or some- 
body knew of him, and we were taken all over the 
wonderful Cathedral, from roof to crypt. We were 
so long at this that we concluded to spend the night 
in Amiens, and push on, next morning, by train to 



A NORMAN INTERLUDE 21 

a village some thirty miles or more away, which was 
one of the objectives of his visit. 

The name of that village I have clean forgotten. 
It has passed like many other names that were 
supposed to be fixed there. But forgotten it is, 
although the place itself is associated with memories 
of rustic hospitality more generous than anything 
that has ever come my way. Well, we arrived at 
the village of the forgotten name, and we put up at 
the house of the station master, in the station build- 
ing itself. There was no inn. The station master 
was somehow, somewhere, within St. Ange's circle 
of friends. He took charge of our kits and showed 
me to what I am sure was the best bedroom. I had 
a guilty feeling that the occupants must have turned 
out for my benefit; but one can only defer to the 
custom of the country. 

Presently Monsieur Station Master, and Madame 
Station Master, and little Station Master jils ap- 
peared, each in best bib and tucker, and led the way 
across the fields, to a little thatched farmhouse two 
miles distant. The railway contingent evidently 
were making holiday. All the way we walked 
through fields of grain, in a wide path which came, 
by and by, to a little bridge over a chattering stream, 
and then to a road, and around a bend in the road 
to the farmhouse, thatched, moss and flowers growing 
in the thatch, and a family growing in the door, 
for the doorway was filled with humans of ages 
from eight to eighty, in rows and tiers. As we 
drew near there was such a display of waving 
handkerchiefs and joyous shouts as would have 



22 LONDON DAYS 

gratified William the Conqueror himself had he been 
passing. 

St. Ange was smothered in embraces, and I was 
bidden in, not to the embraces, but to a seat in the 
fireside, after salutations all round. St. Ange had 
not been in these parts for twenty years. He was 
trustee for some of these younkers, and had now come 
to be relieved of his trust, as the younkers were of 
age in the eyes of the law. You would have thought 
that I was a benefactor, so generous were their at- 
tentions. Food and wine were pressed upon me. 
What the good folk were saying did not enter my 
comprehension; the twists of the Norman tongue 
were beyond me. But smiles are translatable in any 
language and so are hearty courtesies. Presently 
what appeared to be the whole population of the 
neighbouring countryside streamed in, and St. Ange 
and his American friend had to meet them all. We 
met like old friends. Then St. Ange took me to 
call upon some old folk in a cottage not far away. 
We must have been a couple of hours calling about. 
When we returned to the first place a dinner was 
ready for us, and we for it. 

The fat of the land was before us. There was 
every kind of good thing that grew in Normandy. 
And there was wine of the country, and plenty of it. 
The triumph of the occasion was duck, — duck such 
as I never ate before, and have not eaten since, not 
even in Paris, where they have a subtle skill in cook- 
ing these things. I could write rhapsodies about that 
duck. When, even nowadays, I am seeking to whet 
appetite, I think of the ducks I ate in Norman 



A NORMAN INTERLUDE 23 

cottages. No one has eaten duck who has not eaten 
it in Normandy where every housewife seemed to 
me a marvel of a cook. I was in Normandy a week, 
lunched and dined and supped in a different house 
each day — they were chiefly the homes of cottage 
folk — and, for abundance and good feeding, I still 
regard it as a land of miracle. 

How I praised the duck at that first dinner, and 
extolled Madame's skill in cookery ! Madame was 
pleased. Have I conveyed the impression that 
these were wealthy folk.'^ It was not my intention 
to do so. They were Normandy peasants, which 
may mean anything or little as far as well-being goes. 
The room in which we ate was the living room, 
cooking- washing-eating-room. I daresay that be- 
hind a panel, or a curtain, there was an alcove with 
a bed. Anyhow, there was one in an adjoining 
room. And over the dining table was a loft to which 
you mounted by a ladder which was slung against 
the ceiling, when not wanted, by rope and pulley. 
The dining-room floor was of earth, hard packed, 
hard as nails, clean as the proverbial whistle. Every- 
thing shone with cleanliness — windows, napery, 
brass, pewter, plates, kettles — if all the belongings 
of the room had whistled there would have been a 
bellow as if the siren of a big liner had blown. Such 
cleanliness and such cooking I have not found in all 
the years that followed in the many English cottages 
I have known, but I met the combination three or 
four times a day for six or seven days, each time 
beneath a different roof. 

St. Ange and I walked back across the fields by 



24 LONDON DAYS 

moonlight, Monsieur, Madame, and Toddlekins 
Station Master, and two from our feasting house, 
accompanying us. That night I slept Hke a top. 
At noon what was my surprise and joy to find an- 
other duck, duly prepared and cooked by our hostess 
of the preceding day, waiting for me on the station 
master's table. It had been brought by one of her 
small fry with the lady's compliments. There was 
a compliment fit for a prince! Have I mentioned 
the wine that graced the basket, and the miraculous 
green peas that were to melt in the mouth? Ah, 
well, it was long ago, and it was hospitality. 

In that way did Normandy receive us at every 
halt, whether we called at farm, or cottage, or 
chateau. Was there ever such a country for eating 
and drinking, I wondered. At last we arrived at 
Rouen. We had driven in from the country, and 
somewhat wearied and dusty with the journey, we 
were hurried by a stout and jolly man, a gigantic 
person who was in waiting on the road, to a delight- 
ful dwelling in the tovra where three generations of 
St. Ange's relatives welcomed us and would have 
haled us forthwith to the seats of honour, but that 
we pleaded for a wash and a change. 

It was twelve o'clock when we gathered at table. 
It was four when we rose. And when we rose, some- 
thing else was served in the next room. And I was 
told that we must dine at another house, at seven ; 
I think seven was the hour. And we were to sup 
at a third party at eleven ! But I had become ac- 
customed to this splendour of generosity. St. Ange 
had warned me at Amiens that it was inevitable, 



A NORMAN INTERLUDE 25 

and could n't be shirked. And so, after the first 
heroic occasion, the memorable affair of duck at the 
cottage, I made a great show of eating and drinking, 
so that these valiant Norman trenchermen would not 
think me rude and neglectful, and speedily I learned 
how to keep up the appearance of feasting and of 
still having a wee-bit appetite at the end. That was 
doing pretty well, I think, for a novice. And it 
required some skill in calculation, for at each table 
there was everything, and abundance of everything, 
that gourmets or gourmands could desire to eat and 
drink. In seven days there were twenty-one such 
feasts ! 

When we reached London, on our homeward 
journey, I called for sausage and mashed, and a 
tankard of bitter, by way of return to the simple 
life. 

But the kindness of it all, the generous hospitality ; 
the opening of hearts to a stranger who comes with 
an old friend or relative, — in forty years I have 
seen nothing to equal it. The gentleman who killed 
the fatted calf offered but a Barmecide feast in com- 
parison with the provender of my Norman friends. 

A few days after the return from France a telegram 
came to me from St. Ange, saying that his boy was 
seriously ill, and asking me to come at once. In the 
evening I went as quickly as I could to Shepherd's 
Bush. The little chap had taken a chill, pneumonia 
had supervened. The doctor was in the house when 
I arrived. "Can't live through the night," he said. 
The parents were with the little fellow. I dozed 
below in an armchair, knowing that there was need 



26 LONDON DAYS 

of sleep if I were to see these good people through 
the crest of their trouble. An hour after midnight 
the mother came and said: "It is finished! Yes, 
dead. I am anxious for mon mari. He will not 
move, or speak. He sits staring — comme ga. 
Please go to him." 

I aroused St. Ange and made him come with me. 
All night till dawn I walked him, through Shepherd's 
Bush, through Hammersmith, across the Bridge, 
across Barnes Common, through Mortlake and 
Richmond, and back again, making him talk and 
tiring him out. That was the object, to counter 
his nervous excitement by physical fatigue and to 
divert his mind. I brought him home at sunrise, 
limp, exhausted. He slept for ten hours. 

I had to make him see that the world had not 
come to a standstill, that there was no "copy" for 
his paper, and so on. I saw his printers, his pub- 
lishers, and some other people he knew who turned 
out "copy." Between them all they saw him 
through the worst of his problems. This brought 
me in a practical way into connection with the 
outer fringes of Fleet Street and London journalism, 
and in my odd hours I learned how "copy" was 
prepared for the compositors, how proofs were cor- 
rected, how "forms" were made up, and before long 
was able to assist some of my new acquaintances 
when they were pressed for time at these games. 

It was natural enough that in following these 
lines as a joyous amateur I should drift into journal- 
ism. I never intended to stay in it, I preferred to 
write books ; but in those days that seemed a mad 



A NORMAN INTERLUDE 27 

thing to do, — to write books and expect to earn 
money by them. In journalism, if one got his 
"stuff" printed, he got paid, and, if one knew the 
ropes, he had n't to wait forever for the payment. 
There was a certain attractiveness about being paid 
for work one liked to do, and I liked writing better 
than anything else. And I liked the rush and pres- 
sure of journalism as I saw these things manifested 
in the experience of my friends. They had adven- 
tures too ; I also would have them. It seemed 
possible to know everybody, go everywhere, see 
everything, and, if one worked the ropes with skill, 
he might remain his own master. One saw it all 
through rose-coloured glasses. How else should 
youth see anything ? 

Even to-day I see St. Ange through the rose- 
coloured glasses of memory. It is the only way 
possible, for except in memory I have not seen him 
in all these years since we returned from Normandy 
and his boy died. Within a month from the funeral 
Raoul St. Ange and his wife vanished. They had 
returned to France, 't was said, but no one knew. 
His pupils did not know, his printers did not know, 
his paper was dying. I suppose he had n't the heart 
to face the obsequies. He merely vanished. No 
inquiry revealed him. Never a letter, never a wire, 
never a trace of any kind in forty years. 



CHAPTER IV 

I TAKE THE PLUNGE 

I HAVE never been so old as I was during my 
first three or four years in London. It is, or at any 
rate it used to be, a common delusion of youth that 
the mantle of years has descended upon its shoul- 
ders. In my case the shoulders could have carried 
a large mantle. I was tall and big framed, earning 
my living in a foreign country, where, by the way, 
I felt completely at home; my habits of thought 
were far beyond those which custom fixes for the 
'teens, and all my associates were older than myself, 
most of them much older. In the work which cir- 
cumstances and I laid out, youth was by others 
supposed to be a disadvantage, so that it might 
have been natural had I assumed the merit of a 
maturity which I did not possess. But I was not 
compelled to assume it. It was attributed to me. 
Nobody supposed that I was under nineteen. I 
was supposed to be at least half a dozen years older. 

My first editor was George Parsons Lathrop, 
of the Boston Courier. He was a son-in-law of 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he achieved the honour 
of editing my copy by the alacrity with which he 
published it for nothing. As the suggestion was 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 29 

my own the acceptance of non-compensated work 
was entirely fair. If his paper could stand it, I 
could. I wanted practise, and Lathrop wanted 
copy. He was perfectly willing that I should prac- 
tise in his columns. I did n't know him from Adam, 
but had written to him enclosing a "London Letter'* 
which solicited his acceptance on gratuitous terms. 
Beneath my generosity was a design. Not only 
did I need practice but I wanted to be known as 
the London Correspondent of an American paper, in 
order to have the entree at theatres, concerts, political 
gatherings, and other public functions. After sufiB- 
cient practice with Lathrop, I would endeavour to 
sell copy in other quarters. The plan succeeded. 

When the period of gratuitous service had stretched 
far enough, a Boston journal of much interest and 
overwhelming respectability, deigned graciously to 
pay five dollars a letter for my London "stuff." 
The magnitude of this offer did not shock me, but 
five dollars meant a sovereign, and the addition of 
twenty shillings to one's weekly income suggested 
wealth to a young scribbler in London. Three 
or four letters had been despatched when, one even- 
ing, an expensive acquaintance who had rooms above 
mine, near Queen Square, dropped in at my snug 
chambers and spun a yarn. He had "seen Leighton, 
you know, President of the Royal Academy, good 
sort, dev'lish good fellow. What do you suppose 
he 's done now.^^ Taken up a sculptor in Paris, 
French of course, poor as I am, poorer, if it 's possible 
to be poorer than I am, and has had a piece of the 
chap's work sent over here for exhibit at the Acad- 



30 LONDON DAYS 

emy. Sculptor could n't send it. No money. Not 
even a studio. Devilled for years in other men's 
studios. Leighton saw, says fellow must become 
known in London. Got artist chaps to pay expenses 
of sending over. Good fellow, Leighton. Go see it, 
you ! Press Day — Royal Academy — next week. 
Forgot French chap's name ! " 

This brought to my recollection the fact that in 
Paris, the previous Easter, when haunting Bohemia 
with a pack of student friends, I had heard of a 
needy sculptor who was doing things of strange 
power, and was hard up because he would not work 
in accepted forms, but persisted in carving things 
that nobody wanted. And who, in those days, would 
buy sculpture from an "artist unknown"? My 
friends promised that I should meet the man, but 
I was called away from Paris before this could be 
arranged. 

I went to the Royal Academy on Press Day, and 
saw the specimen of the "new man's" work. I was 
quite alone with it. One is always sure to be alone 
in the Statuary Room of the Royal Academy. 
An article came out of the silence. It went to my 
five-dollar editor. He responded with this note : 

"Sorry we can't pay for any more of your letters. 
We printed the last one, but, really, we don't 
want articles about unknown sculptors, especially 
French ones." 

The unknown sculptor, whose name, of course, 
I gave, was Auguste Rodin ! 

I subsequently heard that the article was the 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 31 

first about Rodin to be published in America, and 
that an artist and fellow townsman of mine, Henry 
Bacon, then in Paris, brought it to his attention. 
Months afterward, having followed me half around 
the world, there arrived by post a big and battered 
parcel. It contained a photograph of the sculpture 
I had seen, the bust of Rodin's "St. John Preach- 
ing", and the large mount bore Auguste Rodin's 
autograph with a grateful message to me. I had 
the trophy framed and hung over the fireplace in 
my chambers, and there, whether the fireplace were 
in England or America, it has hung ever since. If 
I were the first to give Auguste Rodin public recog- 
nition in my country, he was the first anywhere to 
acknowledge my stumbling work. 

Vocation was pressing its claims more heavily 
than usual about that time and there was little 
opportunity to pursue a project I had formed for 
writing a series of articles upon "The London of 
Disraeli." Everybody in pendom had written of 
"Dickens' London", and "Thackeray's London", 
and after "Endymion" had made its loudly trump- 
eted appearance, it occurred to me that Disraeli 
had a London which the makers of articles had 
not seized upon and which would yield "material'* 
for interesting copy. This, if well illustrated, 
might appeal to some magazine editor in America 
and subsequently become a book. At the same 
time I was gathering notes and impressions for a 
series of papers which might be called "Odd Corners 
of London." For things of this kind America seemed 
to promise an especially good market, and I believed 



32 LONDON DAYS 

that I could supply it fairly well. One thing after 
another delayed this little plan. Vocation was 
taking up more time and at higher pressure than is 
compatible with hobby-riding. It has a habit of 
doing so. Then a visit to America intervened, for 
the purpose of spending my twenty-first birthday, 
and the following five or six months, at home. The 
return to England was followed by a rush of work in 
the City, and this by an illness of some weeks* 
duration. All the while the Disraeli subject lay 
untouched until, one day in 1882, I met a character 
in a Disraeli novel, who was much more of a charac- 
ter outside it. 

It was a day of powerful rain. The Pullman 
Company were to run their first train in England 
over the Brighton line from Victoria Station. They 
had invited a regiment of celebrities and a few odd 
sticks. Among the latter I was included by some 
oflScial of my acquaintance who thought I might 
write an article for some overseas paper. Tak- 
ing a place in a smoking car I was solitary for but 
a minute, when George Augustus Sala entered hur- 
riedly and plumped himself down beside me, say- 
ing : "What a beastly, blowy, wet morning !" 

"The worst since Noah's time," said I. 

"If this train gets to Brighton and returns through 
the flood, it will be another case not only of pull 
man, but also of pull devil, pull baker," said Sala. 

"There 's copy for you," said I. 

"Oh, are you a journalist?" asked Sala. 

"I'm hoping to be. It's an aspiration." 

"Desperation, more likely," he said. "Don't do 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 33 

it, young man, not if there 's a good crossing to sweep 
in your neighbourhood. Journahsm is the worst 
trade in the world." 

"Every man says that of his own profession," 
I repHed. 

"Profession be hanged! What do we profess? 
We stain paper, and look as wise as owls, and know 
a damned sight more than we ever tell. Most of 
us bleat in our folds like sheep ; few of us have the 
chance to go about the world and see things, and 
even they work like slaves to entertain the public 
while their owners take the profits. The worst 
trade in the world, sir; work harder, know more 
than any other — about human nature, anyhow — 
and get less for it than any other; what we write 
is forgotten the day after it 's printed, and when we 
can't grind out any more, when they Ve squeezed 
our brains dry, we 're thrown on the dust-heap to 
be buried by a benevolent association. Don't 
go into journalism unless you own the paper ! 
That 's where the profits are — big circulation and 
advertising revenue, politics and peerages ! I 'm 
too old for aiming at ownership now ; besides, I 'm 
a writer, not a screw ! Journalism be hanged. If 
I 'd been a chef in a millionaire's palace, or a fashion- 
able hotel, I 'd have done better." 

Possibly. At any rate he would have been the 
prince of chefs as he was "the prince of journalists", 
or was it the king the public called him? He was 
supposed to earn fabulous sums with his pen. If 
he earned them he spent them, for he left nothing 
when he had "gone west." He was an artist in 



34 LONDON DAYS 

cookery, had a knowing taste in wines ; he had 
been everywhere, seen everything, knew every- 
body, and on the shortest possible notice could write 
an article upon anything or nothing. He had a 
flaming face, small, glittering eyes, a build and 
frontage not unlike that of Pierpont Morgan of 
later fame, and a reputation for wit and story-tell- 
ing. He had also a reputation for geniality. He 
was as genial as a thunderstorm. His rumblings 
and clatters might pass quite harmless, or sear you 
with a flash. His familiar signature was "G. A. S." 

"I see you don't believe it," said he, "but you 
will. Don't say I did n't warn you." 

"Thanks," said I. 

"Not in the least," said he. "Go to your doom ! 
What 's your paper ?" 

I said I had written for two or three papers at 
home, in America, and I told him the story of the 
editor who did n't want Rodin. He laughed until 
his white waistcoat nearly burst its buttons. "I 
had an editor once," said he, " who did n't know 
the date of the Battle of Waterloo but was certain 
that Nelson had saved the day. Journalism a 
* profession', eh? And editors are the High Board 
of Examiners. But don't mind me. I 'm like 
this on wet mornings." 

Just then a wet prelate in a shaggy coat shook 
himself at the door, as if he were a huge dog that 
had soaked in the rain. His prelacy was revealed 
by the purple at his throat. 

"Monsignor Capel," exclaimed Sala. "How are 
you ? And did you come in a boat ?" 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 36 

"The voyage from Kensington was rough," said 
the prelate, "but this seems a snug harbour." 

"Make fast to moorings here, and to-morrow the 
envious will say that G. A. S. is travelling Rome- 
wards with you on an American train." 

"Undreamed-of felicity," said the prelate. "But 
I think we shall not go far toward Rome to-day. 
This train has no 'through connection', as they 
say in America. This is my first experience in an 
American train, but not, of course, your first, Mr. 
Sala. Possibly your first, sir," he said, turning to 
me, as he took a seat beside Sala. 

"Oh, no, I 'm an American," said I. 

"Then I am doubly fortunate," said the Mon- 
signor. "Because I am going to America and you 
can tell me how to get about, if you will be so good." 
This was a pleasant way to break the ice, and as 
the train filled, presently we had a pleasant company 
and were speedily at Brighton, where the Pullman 
people entertained their trainload at luncheon. 
On the return journey Monsignor Capel sat opposite 
me at a table built for two, and talked about America. 
That is to say, he asked questions and I answered 
them, as we smoked the Pullman cigars. As we 
parted at Victoria, he invited me to dine at his house, 
making an appointment for the following week. 

He was not only a clever man and "striking", 
as they say, in appearance, but he had great charm, 
and being a Jesuit of brilliant and varied accom- 
plishments, could adapt himself easily to any com- 
pany. As a preacher he was eloquent ; as a man of 
the world he was brilliant and fascinating; as an 



36 LONDON DAYS 

ecclesiastic distinguished and influential ; as a maker 
of titled, wealthy, and in the worldly sense *' impor- 
tant" converts to Rome he was famous, but as the 
administrator of a college or university he proved a 
failure. He was a prominent figure in London 
life; he was the Monsignor Catesby of "Lothair", 
as Manning was the Cardinal Grandison. If his 
fortunes had begun to ebb at the time I knew him, 
the glamour of his successes was still about him. 

Disraeli had described Catesby as "a fascinating 
man who talked upon all subjects except high mass, 
and knew everything that took place at Court with- 
out being present there himself. He led the con- 
versation to the majestic theme, and while he seemed 
to be busied in breaking an egg with delicate pre- 
cision, and hardly listening to the frank expression 
of opinions which he carelessly encouraged, obtained 
a not insufficient share of Lothair's views and im- 
pressions of human beings and affairs in general." 

I dined with Monsignor Capel on several occasions 
at Scarsdale Lodge, in Wright's Lane, Kensington. 
Scarsdale Lodge has for many years known a suc- 
cession of celebrated tenants, of whom Dundreary 
Sothern was one. Sothern had also lived at 
Cedar Villa, next door, and Capel had succeeded 
him there. Now, and for many years, Scarsdale 
Lodge has been the town home of H. Hughes-Stan- 
ton, R.A., whom I have known from almost the 
beginning of things. L^p to the year preceding the 
Pullman excursion Monsignor Capel had lived in 
Cedar Villa. Sothern had made that place famous 
for breakfasts and suppers and practical jokes. 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 37 

Capel's breakfasts had been quite as famous with- 
out the practical jokes. Capel had transformed 
Sothern's bilhard room into a chapel. The dining 
room in which the actor had "exposed" the "feats" 
of the Davenport brothers, and where the lights 
of Bohemia had twinkled, had, under the prelate's 
tenancy, been noted for its hospitality to pilgrims 
from the polite world who were on the way to Rome. 
But the line was not drawn at hungry hearts. Pal- 
ates that were used to dainty feasts were tickled 
there, and brilliant table talk of politics and art, 
of literature and science and society had rippled 
there. Capel's hospitality was wide; his guests 
were, as likely as not, non-conformists — if they 
dared to come — Anglicans who dared anything — 
and political men of all shades of opinion, especially 
anti-Gladstonian opinion. But disciples of the 
G. O. M. were welcome if they were good talkers. 
They might be converted to other politics; at any 
rate they would hear them. 

Monsignor Capel at home was in purple-edged 
cassock, with purple buttons and broad purple 
sash. If in his shaggy overcoat he had suggested 
bulk, in his cassock and biretta he was a dignified, 
even an imposing figure. He received me in his 
study at the twilight hour. The fire-glow played 
over the room, while the papal chamberlain sub- 
mitted to the processes of an interview. But 
*' submitted" is scarcely the right word ; it is merely 
the word that custom applies to the extraction of 
copy from a willing subject. He had invited the 
interviewer and did not pretend that the interview 



38 LONDON DAYS 

was torture. We sat by the fire and spun. The 
room was on the ground floor of the house and in 
the rear, overlooking the garden. His writing desk 
was in a bay window, and above it a crucifix was 
suspended. Near it, on the left wall, hung a large 
photograph of Pope Pius IX and his household. 
The Monsignor himself was not inconspicuous in 
this. About the room were a dozen or more photo- 
graphs of celebrities. Among these was a photo- 
graph of Gladstone. "I keep that here as a pen- 
ance," said Capel, to whom the name of the "Grand 
Old Man" was anathema. 

Capel alluded to himself as a "lamb" in politics, 
but his allusion to politicians opposed to his way of 
thinking were anything but lamblike that early 
evening. He had published a pamphlet called 
"Great Britain and Rome, or Ought the Queen to 
Hold Diplomatic Relations v/ith the Sovereign 
Pontiff?" Of course he held that she ought, and 
he said so to the immense disapproval of the majority 
of his fellow countrymen. He had also produced a 
pamphlet on the Irish Question which, then as 
now, could be counted on for enraging and puzzling 
half the population. The solution proposed by 
him, was, I believe, more Roman Catholicism, but 
why and how to get more of what was already in 
excess one did not see then, and sees now even less 
than before. 

But Capel's star was dimming. His Catholic 
college, or university, or whatever it was, had failed 
for lack of support and faults of administration, and 
the financial troubles were soon to drive him to the 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 39 

bankruptcy court, if they had not already done so. 
And His Eminence Cardinal Manning had thrown 
his influence against the captivating Monsignor. 
The Cardinal had his reasons, and, I suppose, they 
were good reasons. At any rate, like Shylock's, 
they were sufficient. When the Cardinal was 
against a man in his flock, that man's chances for 
preferment, and even for holding his own, were 
not worth discussing. Capel went to America in 
1883. He sailed on the Arizona whose captain was 
the brother of my friend, Henry Murray. The 
Monsignor made a meteoric flash over the Amer- 
ican continent. I saw him there. And then the 
continent swallowed him. He died in California, 
if not unknown then practically forgotten. 

The sequel to my visit at Scarsdale Lodge was an 
article, and the article was sent, on chance, to the 
Boston Herald, then the leading newspaper in New 
England and of almost metropolitan importance. 
I did not know any one connected with the paper, 
not even the editor's name. But the article was 
printed, although I did not know that until some 
months later, at the end of 1882, when I turned up 
in Boston, at the Herald office, and asked for the 
editor, sending him my card with a message of 
inquiry about the article which I had posted to him 
from London some months earlier. 

I intended to ask him for a job, for I had decided 
to settle awhile in Boston and turn my London experi- 
ences to account if the opportunity could be made. 

A boy came to the room where I had waited on 
the anxious seat for an unhappy quarter of an hour. 



40 LONDON DAYS 

**Mr. Holmes will see you," he said. "Come 
this way." 

Holmes was the man's name, was it ! Yes, 
John H. I had learned that much, and I followed 
the boy to an inner office. A dark-haired, slender, 
agreeable-mannered man, who looked rather like 
the Whitelaw Reid of that time, rose from his desk. 
As he did so I said : 

"Mr. Holmes, I believe." 

*'Yes," said he, "and you are the writer of that 
article ? " naming it. 

"Yes," said I. 

He held out his hand, and smiled. We shook 
hands, and I tried to look as if it were my daily occu- 
pation to be welcomed by the editors of powerful 
journals. Naturally, I did n't feel that way, and 
was nervously wondering what to say next. That 
anxiety vanished as the editor asked : 

"Are you at liberty to do any more work of that 
kind, or of any special kind, for us ?" 

"Yes," said I, concealing, I hoped, my eagerness 
and delight. 

"Then I will take as much as you are willing to 
write," said he, " and pay you ten dollars a column, 
and when you go anywhere for us, your expense bill." 

This seemed a fair beginning, particularly as I 
had not been compelled to ask for it, as I had ex- 
pected to do. When I closed the door behind me 
and descended the stairs, I felt an elation of spirit 
that was natural enough in a young chap who was 
more than five months short of his twenty-third 
birthday. 



I TAKE THE PLUNGE 41 

And so, with the beginning of 1883, I took the 
plunge into journalism. There followed five more 
or less adventurous years which carried me from 
one end of the country to the other and across the 
Atlantic and back again. Then in 1888, I was 
appointed London correspondent of the same paper, 
a position which I held for nine years until called 
elsewhere. It is with memories and impressions of 
the London Days of that time, and of some of their 
celebrated personages, that the following pages are 
concerned. 



CHAPTER V 

BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 

You will look in vain now for the old brown-brick 
bungalow that stood, for the most part concealed 
by trees and shrubs, within the railings of the park- 
like enclosure halfway down Sloane Street, on the 
left-hand side, as you go from Knightsbridge. It 
stood there till the end of the eighties. If you 
walked there in the days of my early acquaintance 
with it, or glided through Sloane Street in a hansom, 
the chances were that the bungalow v/ould still 
escape your glance, sheltered as it was by foliage. 
But from the top of any 'bus you could make it 
out readily, and you would wonder, as most 'bus 
fares did, what lucky or eccentric fellow lived within 
the very plain walls and had all that Cadogan en- 
closure as a back garden. Probably your neighbour 
on the 'bus top would tell you, 'bus neighbours 
being at all times well stocked with misinformation, 
that the favoured dwelling was the home of the 
gardener of the enclosure. But it was not. It 
was the home of my delightful friend, Felix Mos- 
cheles, and there you could find Robert Browning 
almost any Sunday afternoon when he was in London. 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 43 

Felix Stone Moseheles was the son of Ignaz Mos- 
cheles, composer and pianist, whose intimate friend- 
ship with Mendelssohn is revealed in the latter's 
published correspondence. Felix was born in Lon- 
don February 8, 1833, at Number 3 Chester Place, 
Regent's Park, and Mendelssohn acted as his god- 
father at the christening in St. Pancras Church. 
FeHx died at Tunbridge Wells, December 22, 1917. 
He was as kind a man as ever lived. He was an 
artist by profession, fond of music and musicians, 
as you might expect him to be; he spoke several 
languages fluently and with equal charm — Eng- 
lish, French, German, Esperanto, and I know not 
what else — and he was passionately attached to 
movements for world peace. We know that noth- 
ing made for the peace of the world down to mid- 
1914 ; that while Germany had been deceiving 
it, the world had lulled itself to sleep with "drowsy 
syrups" and ecstatic daydreams. I think the 
awakening killed my dear old friend. That is not 
surprising. He was over eighty-one when the war 
broke out, and almost eighty-five when he died. 
Down to 1913, when I saw him last, I used to say 
that he was the youngest man of my acquaintance. 
He had the optimism of youth, its buoyant spirit, 
its gallant outlook. 

When I first knew Moseheles he was only fifty- 
five or fifty-six, and he was passing cakes to the 
ladies, while his wife poured tea, and a stoutish 
man in a grey checked suit, and with grey mous- 
tache and chin-beard, was talking something which 
seemed like philosophy, and was certainly not 



44 LONDON DAYS 

poetry, to a mixed group in a cosy corner. It was 
one of the happy points about Moscheles' Sunday 
afternoons that if you cared to continue talking 
with another caller and the other caller cared to 
continue to listen, or to talk with you, you were not 
routed up to exchange commonplaces about the 
weather with somebody else who needed to be assured 
that it rained, or that the sun was shining. You 
could flit from group to group, and find a place where 
you fitted, and the host or hostess would contrive, 
if you were unknown, to make you known to some 
one without interrupting some one else's story, so 
that no one was left adorning the wall. 

The stoutish, grey man in the grey checked suit 
was Robert Browning whose afternoon-tea manner 
was quite simple, as unaffected as that of a bank- 
chairman contemplating dividends or deposits. He 
was not in the least a posing poet. He had been a 
great friend of Moscheles for a long time, and the 
latter spoke of him as *'my literary godfather." 
Moscheles, at this time, was preparing for publica- 
tion "Felix Mendelssohn's letters to Ignaz and 
Charlotte Moscheles." I had something to do with 
persuading him to write *'In Bohemia with George 
Du Maurier." I had been looking in his studio 
through a mass of autograph letters and sketches 
relating to his years in Paris as an art student, the 
"Trilby" years, and, as Du Maurier's book and 
the play adapted from it were the rage of the time, 
Felix was encouraged to write around the letters 
he had, and Du Maurier's early sketches, and about 
the characters in the romance of the hour, and to 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 45 

send some of the chapters to the Century MagazinCy 
and afterward to produce the whole as a book. 

Moscheles was brought up among celebrities, 
and was surrounded by the famous all his life. 
Mendelssohn, Joachim, Malibran, Lablache were, 
in his boyhood, family friends. He attracted dis- 
tinguished persons as long as he lived. When he 
was thirteen the family moved from London to 
Leipzig, at Mendelssohn's instigation. Mendelssohn 
was eager that his friend, Moscheles' father, should 
become a professor in the Conservatoire which he 
was founding at Leipzig. And so the move was 
made, Ignaz Moscheles relinquishing his London 
career and its worldly advantages in order to live 
near his friend. Felix, who at ten had begun his 
education at King's College, London, had, at thir- 
teen, to find it in Germany. But not for long; 
when he was seventeen, determined to become an 
artist, he began studying drawing and painting in 
Paris, at the Atelier Gleyre. Having seen some- 
thing of the troubles of Germany in 1848, he was 
now to see the troubles of France which led to and 
followed the flight of Louis Philippe, and attended 
the coup d'etat. 

It was during the Atelier Gleyre period that he 
met George du Maurier and had the amusing ex- 
periences he described afterwards in the book to 
which I have alluded. From Paris he went to Ant- 
werp, where he studied under Van Lorino at De 
Keyser's Academy, and where he had as fellow 
students Laurens Alma-Tadema, Maris, and Heyer- 
mans. I don't know when he returned to London 



46 LONDON DAYS 

to settle down, but when he did so he began a career 
that was to be rich in friendships, helpful to all, and 
productive in portraiture. 

As a portrait painter he was at his best, I think. 
As long ago as 1862, in his studio at Cadogan Gar- 
dens, he painted a portrait of Mazzini which, after 
Mazzini's death, he offered to present to Italy. 
But official Italy at that time was not desiring por- 
traits of Mazzini and the offer was declined. Now, 
after the painter's death, the portrait goes to a 
museum at Milan. In 1882, Moscheles visited 
America, accompanying his friends Henry Irving 
and Ellen Terry on their first journey over the 
Atlantic. He painted Grover Cleveland, during 
the week when Cleveland was first elected to the 
Presidency, and talked with him of the subjects 
which absorbed the artist, — International Arbi- 
tration and Universal Peace. His portrait of Brown- 
ing went to the Armour Institute, Chicago. Other 
portraits of his which were quite remarkable, which 
linger in the memory, were of his mother, Charlotte 
Moscheles, Rubinstein, H. M. Stanley, Gounod, 
Sarasate, Tom Mann, Israels, Stepniak, George 
Jacob Holyoake (at the age of eighty) ; he made 
beautiful water colours of Venice, of Spain, of Sicily, 
of Cairo, of Tunis, of Algerian subjects ; and later 
was quite fascinated by his scheme of painting a 
series of "Pictures with a Purpose." 

But the *' Pictures with a Purpose" did not, I 
think, attract persons less purposeful than the 
painter. They were socialistic pictures, reforming, 
philanthropic, propagandist, as if the painter were 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 47 

preaching by paint and canvas. I think his oral 
preaching was preferred. 

I have mentioned the old brown-brick bungalow 
where Moscheles lived in Cadogan Gardens, where 
I first knew him, and first saw Robert Browning. 
Moscheles had lived there for I know not how many 
years, but when his lease expired, in the early nine- 
ties, the bungalow expired too. The march of 
"improvement" was coming down Sloane Street, 
and the bungalow was doomed. It disappeared 
from the gaze of surrounding and jealous neighbours 
who might have keys to the gardens but could not 
live in those pleasant demesnes. In the Elm Park 
Road, near the borders of Chelsea and Fulham, 
Moscheles found a house with an unusually large 
garden. He transformed the house and built a 
studio which he connected with it, and there one 
went to so many melodious evenings and artistic 
afternoons that through the years of recollection 
I seem to behold him hospitably dispensing tea and 
bread and butter, attended by swarms of musicians 
who were, or were to become, famous ; by poets 
and painters who had found, or still were seeking, 
celebrity; by dreamers who were going to free 
Russia ; or zealous gentlemen, like Baron d'Estour- 
nelles de Constant, who were not only labouring 
for the Hague Conferences but for the Parliament 
of Man. 

It was there that Mark Hambourg first played 
when he came to London. I remember the occasion 
well enough, but not the music, for I cannot forget 
that phenomenally ugly youngster. He was then 



48 LONDON DAYS 

only a boy. But the music rippled and thundered 
from his fingers, while that amazing head with its 
torrential hair cast shivering shadows over the 
magical keyboard. The unprepossessing youth was 
then unknown. He became known soon enough 
and he ran quickly to the fame that waits upon 
pianists of remarkable gifts. 

Moscheles was a citizen of the world, which he 
regarded as his native country, so it was natural 
enough that he should take a lively interest in 
Esperanto in the days when people thought it a 
fad, and he became, as he remained, President of 
the London Esperanto Club. He was constantly 
corresponding with congenial folk in remote coun- 
tries with the object of spreading the merits of 
Esperanto as an auxiliary language for international 
intercourse. "Even now," he said a generation 
ago, "I can go anywhere with it, and by its aid find 
somebody who will make me feel at home." He 
was a tireless propagandist. I would venture to 
say that he loved "propaganding" more than art. 
At any rate he could seldom avoid diluting his paint- 
ing with propaganda in the contented Victorian era 
when little wars were fought every six months and 
trouble looked for between whiles. How easy it 
seemed in those days, when most of us were credulous, 
to achieve Liberty by lecturing ! 

Partly through his zeal for Esperanto and partly 
through his passion for a "Free Russia", he was 
particularly keen to meet Stepniak. I had known 
the latter for some years, having as long ago as 1885 
or 1886 written an article about him for the New 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 49 

York Tribune. The meeting with Moscheles was 
brought about one night at a "Smoke Talk" in 
my home in Cheyne Walk, and from that moment 
the two men became fast friends, remaining so 
until Stepniak's tragic death. Whether Stepniak 
had or had not killed an official in Russia I don't 
know, and I do not care much. If he had killed 
him I dare say the man deserved it, for, of all the 
plundering and oppressive gangs of officialdom, 
the Russians of that era had about the worst ; they 
robbed like desperados and they ruled their land 
with lies, torture, and corruption. In a country 
capable of producing the "Revolution" of 1917 
and the later Bolshevism, anything was possible in 
the mid-eighties, — anything except the shadow of 
freedom. The tall dark Russian with the thin beard 
and the thin squeaky voice was a striking contrast 
to Moscheles, who was grey, and rather short than 
tall, and whose quiet geniality was the bloom on a 
trustful, generous character that invited confidence. 
Stepniak used to say that he never became quite ac- 
customed to the liberty of English life. The op- 
posite character of Russian habits had bitten too 
deeply into him. I remember that when he first 
came to London he w^ould look around furtively when 
in the street, and if we stopped at a corner to talk 
he would ask: "Will the police allow this? In 
Russia they would not after dark." If he had lived 
to see London during the Great War he might have 
felt much more at home. 

No one was ever bored at the Moscheles' after- 
noons. How could one be bored when host and 



50 LONDON DAYS 

hostess gave no thought to themselves but all their 
thought to their guests? Even the Swami I met 
there did not depress my spirits as many Swamis 
have done. I forget his name. I have met regi- 
ments of them in one country and another. Mostly 
they blazed, not with humility but importance. 
He, I say, had a worldly air, as if he were an Anglican 
bishop. He had also a sense of humour which was 
not entirely subdued as he listened to an American 
lady expounding the doctrine of "Votes for Women." 
"Madame," said he, "may I ask a question?" 

The lady looked assent. 

"Your husband: does he share these views?'* 

"Not yet," she replied. 

"Ah," said the Swami. And there were gusts of 
laughter. 

"I may add," said the lady, "that I am not yet 
married." 

Then the laughter came in shrieks, and the Swami 
smiled. But this, of course, was a generation before 
the suffragettes were brandishing hatchets like the 
Redmen, and burning churches and slashing paint- 
ings like the Huns. 

But I have alluded to Browning, and have done 
so because whenever I think of Moscheles, I always 
think of him in association with Browning. Their 
friendship was very intimate, and that is one fact 
which shows the kind of man Moscheles was. After 
that glimpse and how-d'ye-do-good-bye at the old 
brown-brick bungalow which the Earl of Cadogan 
was so glad to destroy when the chance arrived to 
do so, it had been arranged by Moscheles and the 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 51 

poet that we should meet again with another friend 
of the three at a little lunch of four. But fate, or, 
to be precise, politics, which may be another name 
for fate, decided otherwise, and I had to go far 
afield to chronicle the results. Never again did 
that little company come together unless it were 
at Browning's open grave, on the midday of the 
dying year. The reaper Death had mown quickly. 

When the scene shifted to Westminster Abbey, 
I waited at the cloister doors till I could pass to a 
seat in the Poets' Corner. While waiting at the 
door, I heard from the pressing throng behind me 
the voice of an Irish writer whom I had known and 
had lost from sight five years before. While looking 
for the familiar face that belonged to the delicious 
brogue, there came the sound of a great key turning 
an ancient lock, and then the door swung open. 
"Come," said another friend, and we went in, getting 
separated before we had gone far, but taking seats 
near the draped grave. 

Browning's son was chief mourner. The poet 
had died in his son's home, the Palazzo Rezzonico, 
in Venice. And now, this day at Westminster was 
the last day of 1889. The great bell of the Abbey 
began tolling; its deep notes floated down from its 
tower as they sought lodgment in the hearts of 
the assembling throng, and with every stroke some 
face appeared that all England, or the world, knew 
well. After thirty years I can recall many of the 
faces that the grey light of the dull day, softened 
by the colouring of the Abbey windows, fell upon. 
There were tiers of people. Even the openings in 



52 LONDON DAYS 

the triforium revealed them, and by the great 
western doors they were packed, though they could 
catch but glimpses of the chancel, and most of them 
not that. Huxley's was the first face I saw. I 
had first seen it in the same place, almost on the 
same spot, years before, at Darwin's funeral. Max 
Muller and George Meredith were near him now. 
One thought that England sent her celebrated living 
men that day to meet the famous multitudes whose 
bodies have been laid away beneath the Abbey 
pavement for centuries upon centuries. There 
were Lord Wolseley and the Lord Chief Justice, 
Lord (then Professor) Bryce, Frederic Harrison, 
Holman Hunt, Henry Irving, Sidney Colvin, Whist- 
ler and Poynter and Alma-Tadema and Sir John 
Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury). 

London was covered with a thickening fog. You 
could scarcely see the Abbey from Dean's Yard. 
Within the Abbey the arches aloft dissolved in mist, 
a mist of copper and pale gold where the light glanced 
through rose windows. Slipping into one's memory 
came Mrs. Browning's lines : 

*' — view the city perish in the mist 
Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea, 
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host 
Sucked down and choked to silence." 

Candles from the choir places, and long-chained 
lamps, sent their soft, yellow gleams eerily through 
the veil which seemed to hang above us. And as 
the high noon drew near my glances fell upon the 
historians Kinglake, Lecky, and Froude. Would 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 53 

any one of the three ever write of this scene in Eng- 
land's history, I wondered? Bret Harte, Burne- 
Jones, George du Maurier, Leslie Stephen, William 
Black, Bancroft, and John Hare, and the publishers 
Blackwood, Macmillan, Murray, and Spottiswoode, 
ambassadors and ministers, the heads of universities, 
of learned societies, were shown to their places, 
singly or in groups, or took positions where they 
could find them, standing against the monuments. 
And when no more people could find space, the Abbey 
clock struck twelve, and the great west doors swung 
open, and down the long central aisle came the 
funeral train. Then arose the choral music which 
for one hundred and seventy years has risen at every 
burial within the Abbey, the burial oflSce composed 
and played by Croft and Purcell when they were 
organists at Westminster. 

Sir Frederick Bridge is playing it now, as Robert 
Browning, all there is of him on earth, is carried 
on his bier through the dense throng, to pause a 
while at the foot of the chancel steps beneath the 
central lantern. Choir and clergy precede him. 
On either side of him walk Hallam Tennyson, 
Doctor Butler (of Trinity College, Cambridge), 
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Theodore Martin, 
Archdean Farrar, Professor Masson, Professor Jowett 
(master of Balliol), Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir 
James Paget, Sir George Grove, George Murray 
Smith (Browning's publisher), and Professor Knight 
(of the University of St. Andrews). Then as the 
service proceeds (the Archbishop of Canterbury 
is here, Dean Vaughan, and others eminent in the 



54 LONDON DAYS 

Church) the choristers sing a *' Meditation" which 
Sir Frederick Bridge has composed to Mrs. Brown- 
ing's poem : 

"What would we give to our beloved? 
The hero's heart to be unmoved, 

The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep, 
The patriot's voice to teach and rouse. 
The monarch's crown to light the brows ? 

' He giveth His beloved sleep.' 

"O earth, so full of dreary noises ! 
O men, with wailing in your voices ! 

O delved gold, the wailers heap ! 
O strife, O curse that o'er it fall ! 
God strikes a silence through you all. 
And 'giveth His beloved sleep.' 

"His dews drop mutely on the hill, 
His cloud above it saileth still, 

Though on its slopes men sow and reap. 
More softly than the dew is shed. 
Or cloud is floated overhead, 

'He giveth His beloved sleep.'" 

The organ and the choir paused; all sounds 
died away. God struck a silence through us all. 
It fell upon a throng that faced the world's loss as 
if suddenly confronted by the flight of the soul for 
whose absence all mourned. And just then there 
fell a shaft of sunlight, golden, magical, touching 
the bier, and then it faded slowly away. To many, 
very many among the silent company, the loss by 
this death was a personal one ; to all it had more 
than a touch of that. It must be so when a great 
poet dies. What I remember as vividly as all else 



BROWNING AND MOSCHELES 55 

was the great number of young faces in the Abbey, 
as if the rising generation did reverence to him who 
had passed. 

By and by the last hymn had been sung, the Dean 
had pronounced the benediction, and Bridge, at 
the great organ, made the old Abbey thrill to its 
inmost stones with the vibrating tones of the Dead 
March from "Saul." Now the coffin had been 
lowered into its grave at the foot of Chaucer's tomb. 
Before us and at each hand were monuments, tablets, 
inlaid stones, marking the burial places of Spenser, 
Dryden, Gay, of Butler and Casaubon, Ben Jon- 
son, Addison and Cowley, Prior, Macaulay and 
Grote ; of Handel, Campbell, Sheridan, and Garrick. 
I stood on the grave of Dickens. And the throng 
passed slowly, reverently gazing into the dark grave 
where Browning's body had been laid as the old year 
was dying. Pealing through nave and transepts 
and the chapels of Kings, above the altar and the 
tombs of soldiers, sailors, statesmen — the brood 
who had made England and sung of her — the 
rumbling and trumpeting of the Dead March. 
Might not Shakespeare and Milton, Doctor John- 
son, and Goldsmith and Gray have come to the 
Poets' Corner that day at noon to join the company, 
and to greet, from their own memorials, this other 
man who had helped to make England ? It seemed 
quite probable as we passed from that real world 
into the world of fog, and the closing door of the 
Poets' Corner shut in behind us the now tremulous 
notes of the organ. 

How often have I heard Sir Frederick stir the 



56 LONDON DAYS 

slumbering majesty, beauty, and solemnity that 
lie within the Abbey organ, stir them to living wonder 
on occasions like this ? More times than I can easily 
recall. In capitals and churches and cathedrals, 
in many parts of the world, that March from "Saul" 
has awakened memories within me. My earliest 
memory of music concerns itself with a military 
band, marching slowly, slowly down a hill, troops 
following with reversed arms, a gun carriage carry- 
ing something that was not a gun, covered with 
a flag; horses whose riders moved very slowly; 
coaches that young eyes saw as beyond number; 
and then a hole-in-the-ground. Men carried some- 
thing on their shoulders from the gun carriage and 
lowered it into the hole; other men fired guns at 
the sky. A hawk flew full circle in the blue. And 
some one said, "My boy, take a last look where your 
father lies." Then the Dead March rolled and 
moaned again, and fixed itself on one of the pins of 
memory. 

The solemn notes always bring back those mo- 
ments, as a vision in which a small boy made his 
first acquaintance with Death. But they have 
never seemed to humble and exalt, moan and triumph 
and sob and victoriously march to the rhythm of 
the winds, so charged with majesty, as when Sir 
Frederick touched the heart of his instrument at 
the Abbey. The occasion, the place drenched with 
memories, the simple ceremony, the music's magic, 
and the mystery of it all make of this tribute to 
Death one of the rich experiences of living. 



CHAPTER VI 

PATTI 

One broiling afternoon — it was in August, 1893 — 
a Great Western train from London left me at a wee- 
bit station on the top of a Welsh mountain. The 
station was called "Penwylt." It overlooked the 
Swansea Valley, and stood about halfway between 
Brecon and the sea. When a traveller alighted at 
Penwylt there was no need to ask why he did so. 
He could have but one destination, and that was 
Craig-y-Nos Castle, the home of Madame Patti. 
She was then Madame Patti-Nicolini ; she after- 
ward became the Baroness Cederstrom. I shall use 
here the name by which, for sixty years, she has been 
known to an adoring world. A carriage from the 
castle was awaiting me, and quickly it bore me down 
the steep road to the valley, a sudden turn showing 
the Patti palace there on the banks of the Tawe. 
The Castle was two miles distant and a thousand 
feet below the railway. An American flag was fly- 
ing on the tower. It flew there through the week 
of my visit, for was I not an ambassador from the 
American Public to the Queen of Song ? 

Mr. Gladstone once told Madame Patti that he 
would like to make her Queen of Wales. But she 



58 LONDON DAYS 

was that already, and more. She was Queen of 
Hearts the world over, and every soul with an ear 
was her liege. And, literally, in Wales Patti was 
very like a queen. She lived in a palace; people 
came to her from the ends of the earth; she was 
attended with "love, honour, troops of friends"; 
and whenever she went beyond her own immediate 
gardens the country folk gathered by the roadside, 
dropping curtseys and throwing kisses to her bonny 
majesty. 

Her greeting of me was characteristic of this most 
famous and fortunate of women, this unspoiled 
favourite of our whirling planet. A group of her 
friends stood merrily chatting in the hall, and, as I 
approached, a dainty little woman with big brown 
eyes came running out from the centre of the com- 
pany, stretched forth her hands, spoke a hearty 
welcome, and accompanied it with the inimitable 
smile which had made slaves of emperors. She 
had the figure and vivacity of a girl. She was fifty 
that year, but, there in broad daylight, looked 
fifteen or twenty years younger. This is not an 
illusion of gallantry, but a statement of fact. 

There was a kind of family party at Craig-y-Nos. 
Stiffness and dullness, and the usual country-house 
talk about horses and guns, golf and fishing, did 
not prevail there. La Divas guests were intimate 
friends, and chiefly a company of English girls who 
were passing the summer with her. In the evening, 
when all assembled in the drawing-room before 
going in to dinner, I found that we represented five 
nationalities, — Italian, Spanish, French, English, 



PATTI 59 

and American. While we awaited the appearance 
of our hostess, the gathering seemed like a polyglot 
congress. 

As the chimes in the tower struck the hour of 
eight, a fairy vision appeared at the drawing-room 
door, — Patti, royally gowned and jewelled. The 
defects of the masculine intellect leave me incapable 
of describing the costume of that radiant little 
woman. It belonged to one of her operatic char- 
acters, I forget which one. But my forgetfulness 
does n't matter. The sight brought us to our feet, 
bowing as if we had been a company of court gallants 
in the "spacious days of great Elizabeth", and we 
added the modern tribute of applause, which our 
queen acknowledged with a silvery laugh. I re- 
member only that the gown was white and of some 
silky stuff, and that about La Diva's neck were loops 
of pearls, and that above her fluffy chestnut hair 
were glittering jewels. With women it may be 
different, but mere man cannot give a list of Patti's 
adornments on any occasion ; he can know only 
that they became her, and that he saw only her 
happy face. Before our murmurs had ceased, Patti, 
who had not entered the room, but had merely stood 
in the portal, turned, taking the arm of the guest 
who was to sit at her right, and away we marched 
in her train, as if she were truly the queen, through 
the corridors to the conservatory, where dinner was 
served. 

It was my privilege at the Castle table to sit at 
Madame Patti's left. At her right was one whose 
friendship with her dated from the instant of her 



60 LONDON DAYS 

first European triumph. Heavens ! — How many 
years ago? But it was a quarter of a century less 
than it now is at the time of which I am writing. 
The delight of those luncheons and dinners at 
Craig-y-Nos is unforgettable. There was a notion 
abroad that these meals were held "in state"; but 
they were not. There was merely the ordinary 
dinner custom of an English mansion. The menu, 
though, was stately enough, for the art of cookery 
was practised at Craig-y-Nos by a master who had 
earned the right to prepare dinners for Patti. The 
dining room was seldom used in summer for, hand- 
some though that apartment is, Patti, and her guests, 
too, for that matter, preferred to be served in the 
great glass room which was formerly the conservatory 
and was still called so. There we sat, as far as out- 
look goes, out of doors ; in whatever direction we 
gazed we looked up or down the Swansea Valley, 
across to the mountains, and along the tumbling 
course of the river Tawe. I was risking [some 
neglect of my dinner, for I sat gazing at the wood- 
covered cliffs of Craig-y-Nos (Rock-of-the-Night) 
opposite, and listening to the ceaseless prattle of 
the mountain stream. Patti, noticing my admiration 
of the view, said, "You see what a dreadful place it 
is in which I bury myself." 

"'Bury' yourself! On the contrary, here you 
are at the summit of Paradise, and you have dis- 
covered the fountain of perpetual youth. A 'dread- 
ful place', indeed! It's the nearest thing to fairy- 
land." 

"But one of your countrymen says that I 'hide 



PATTI 61 

far from the world among the ugly Welsh hills.' 
He writes it in an American journal of fabulous 
circulation, and I suppose people believe the tale." 

Patti laughed at the thought of a too credulous 
public, and then she added : 

"Really, they write the oddest things about my 
home, as if it were either the scene of Jack-the-Giant- 
Killer's exploits on the top of the Beanstalk, or a 
prison in a desolate land." 

After visiting Patti at Craig-y-Nos I wondered 
no more why this enchanting woman sang "Home, 
Sweet Home" so that she fascinated millions. Her 
own home was far from being "humble", but it 
was before all things, a home. And she had earned 
it. There is not anywhere a lovelier spot, nor 
was there elsewhere a place so remote and at 
the same time so complete in every resource of civil- 
ization. 

Dinner passed merrily. Merrily is exactly the 
word to describe it. Up and down the table good 
stories flew, sometimes faster than one could catch 
them. Nobody liked a good joke better than Patti, 
and when she heard one that particularly pleased 
her she would interpret it to some guest who had 
not sufficiently mastered the language in which it 
was told. It was all sheer comedy, and after watch- 
ing it, and hearing La Diva speak in a variety of 
tongues, I asked : 

"I wonder if you have what people call a native 
tongue, or whether all of them came to you as a 
gift of the gods." 

"Oh, I don't know so many languages," she 



62 LONDON DAYS 

replied, "only — let 's see — English, German, Ital- 
ian, Spanish, and Russian." 

"And which do you speak best, or like best?" 

" I really don't know. To me there is no difference, 
as far as readiness goes, and I suppose ' the readiness 
is all.'" 

"Not quite all. But what is your favourite, if 
you have a favourite among them.'^" 

"Oh, Italian! Listen!" 

And then she recited an Italian poem. Next to 
hearing Patti sing, the sweetest sound was her 
Italian speech. Presently she said : 

"Speaking of languages, Mr. Gladstone paid me 
a pretty compliment a little while ago — nearly 
three years ago. I will show you his letter to- 
morrow, if you care to see it." 

Patti forgot nothing. The next day she brought 
me Mr. Gladstone's letter. The Grand Old Man 
had been among her auditors at Edinburgh, and after 
the performance he went on the stage to thank her 
for the pleasure she had given him. He complained 
a little of a cold which had been troubling him, and 
Patti begged him to try some lozenges which she 
found useful. That night she sent him a little box 
of them. The old statesman acknowledged the gift 
with this letter ; 

6, Rothesay Terrace, 
Edinburgh. 
October 22, 1890. 

Dear Madame Patti : 

I do not know how to thank you enough for your 
charming gift. I am afraid, however, that the use 



PATTI 63 

of your lozenges will not make me your rival. Voce 
quastata di ottante' anni non si ricwpera. 

It was a rare treat to hear from your Italian lips 
last night the songs of my own tongue, rendered 
with a delicacy of modulation and a fineness of 
utterance such as no native ever in my hearing had 
reached or even approached. Believe me, 

Faithfully yours, 

W. E. Gladstone. 

This letter, naturally enough, gave conversation 
a reminiscent turn. After some talk of great folk 
she had known, I asked Madame Patti what had 
been the proudest experience in her career. 

"For a great and unexpected honour most grace- 
fully tendered," said she, "I have known nothing 
that has touched me more deeply than a compliment 
paid by the Prince of Wales (afterwards King 
Edward VII) and a distinguished company, at a 
dinner given to the Duke of York and the Princess 
May (the present King and Queen), a little while 
before their wedding. The dinner was given by 
Mr. Alfred Rothschild, one of my oldest and best 
friends. There were many royalties present and 
more dukes and duchesses than I can easily re- 
member. During the ceremonies the Prince of 
Wales arose, and to my astonishment, proposed 
the health of his 'old and valued friend, Madame 
Patti.' He made such a pretty speech, and in the 
course of it said that he had first seen and heard me 
in Philadelphia in 1860, when I sang in ' Martha ', 
and that since then his own attendance at what 
he was good enough to call my ' victories in the realm 
of song' had been among his pleasantest recollec- 



64 LONDON DAYS 

tions. He recalled the fact that on one of the 
occasions, when the Princess and himself had in- 
vited me to Marlborough House, his wife had held 
up little Prince George, in whose honour we were 
this night assembled, and bade him kiss me, so that 
in after life he might say that he had 'kissed the 
famous Madame Patti.' And then, do you know, 
that whole company of royalty, nobility, and men 
of genius rose and cheered me and drank my health. 
Don't you think that any little woman would be 
proud, and ought to be proud, of a spontaneous 
tribute like that?" 

It is difficult, when repeating in this way such 
snatches of biography, to suggest the modest tone 
and manner of the person whose words may be re- 
corded. It is particularly difficult in the case of 
Madame Patti, who was absolutely unspoiled by 
praise. Autobiography such as hers must read a 
little fanciful to most folk; it is so far removed 
from the common experiences of us all and even 
from the extraordinary experiences of the renowned 
persons we hear about usually. But there was not 
a patch of vanity in Patti's sunny nature. Her life 
had been a long, unbroken record of success, — 
success to a degree attained by no other woman. 
No one else has won and held such homage ; no one 
else had been so wondrously endowed with beauty 
and genius and sweet simplicity of nature, — a 
nature unmarred by flattery, by applause, by wealth, 
by the possession and exercise of power. Patti 
at fifty was like a girl in her ways, in her thoughts, 
her spirit, in her disinterestedness, in her enjoy- 



PATTI 65 

ments. Time had dimmed none of her charms, it 
had not lessened then her superb gifts. She said 
to me one day : 

"They tell me I am getting to be an old woman, 
but I don't believe it. I don't feel old. I feel 
young. I am the yomigest person of my acquaint- 
ance." 

That was true enough, as they knew who saw 
Patti from day to day. She had all the enthusiasm 
and none of the affectations of a young girl. When 
she spoke of herself it was with most delicious frank- 
ness and lack of self-consciousness. She was per- 
fectly natural. 

She promised to show me the programme of that 
Philadelphia performance before the Prince of Wales 
so long ago, and the next day she put it before me. 
It was a satin programme with gilt fringe, and it 
was topped by the Prince of Wales's feathers. At 
that Philadelphia performance Patti made her first 
appearance before royalty. In the next year she 
made her London debut at Covent Garden, as 
Amina in "La Somnambula." The next morning 
Europe rang with the fame of the new prima donna 
from America. 

"I tried to show them that the young lady from 
America was entitled to a hearing," said she, as we 
looked over the old programmes. 

"And has 'the young lady from America' kept 
her national spirit, or has she become so much a 
citizen of the world that no corner of it has any 
greater claim than another upon her affections?" 

"I love the Italian language, the American people. 



66 LONDON DAYS 

the English country, and my Welsh home," she 
said. 

" Good ! The national preferences, if you can 
be said to own any, have reason on their side. Your 
parents were Italian, you were born in Spain, you 
made your first professional appearance in America, 
you first won international fame in England, and 
among these Welsh hills you have planted a para- 
dise." 

"How nice of you! That evening at Mr. Alfred 
Rothschild's, the Prince of Wales asked me why 
I do not stay in London during 'the season', and 
take some part in its endless social pleasures. 'Be- 
cause, your Royal Highness,' I replied, 'I have a 
lovely home in Wales, and whenever I come away 
from it I leave my heart there.' 'After all,' said the 
prince, 'why should you stay in London when the 
whole world is only too glad to make pilgrimages 
to Craig-y-Nos ? ' Was n't that nice of him ? " 

I despair of conveying any impression of the 
naivete with which the last five words were uttered. 
The tone expressed the most innocent pleasure in 
the world. When Patti spoke in that way she seemed 
to be wondering why people should say and do so 
many pleasant things on her account. There was 
an air of childish surprise in her look and voice. 

I said: "All good republicans have a passion for 
royalty. I find that an article about a King, or a 
Queen, or a Prince is in greater demand in the United 
States than anywhere else in the world. So tell 
me something more about the Prince and Princess 
of Wales. I promise, as a zealous democrat, that 



PATTI 67 

no one on the far side of the Atlantic will skip a 
word. Have the Prince and Princess visited Craig- 
y-Nos?" 

"No. But they were coming here a couple of 
years ago. See — here is the Prince's letter fixing 
the date. But it was followed by the death of the 
Duke of Clarence, their eldest son, and then for 
many months they lived in quiet and mourning, only 
appearing in their usual way just before the wedding 
of the Duke of York (King George V). They sent 
me an invitation to the wedding festivities. But 
alas ! I could not go. I had just finished my 
season and was lying painfully ill with rheumatism. 
You heard of that? For weeks I suffered acutely. 
It 's an old complaint. I have had it at intervals 
ever since I was a child. But about that royal 
wedding. When the Prince and Princess of Wales 
learned that I was too ill to accept their gracious 
invitation, they — well, what do you suppose they 
did next?" 

"Something kind and graceful." 

"They sent me two large portraits of themselves, 
bearing their autographs and fitted into great gilt 
frames. You shall see the portraits after dinner. 
They have the places of honour at Craig-y-Nos." 

We had reached the coffee stage of dinner, and 
the cigars were being passed. The ladies did not 
withdraw, according to the mediaeval (and shall I 
say popular?) habit, but the company remained 
unbroken, and while the gentlemen smoked, the 
ladies kept them in conversation. Nowadays you 
would say they all smoked. Presently, some one 



68 LONDON DAYS 

proposed Patti's health, and we all stood, singing, 
"For She 's a Jolly Good Fellow." 

That put the ball of merriment in motion again. 
One of the young ladies, a goddaughter of the hostess, 
carolled a stanza from a popular ditty. At first I 
thought it audacious that any one should sing in 
the presence of La Diva. It seemed sacrilege. But 
in another instant we were all at it, piping the chorus, 
and Patti leading off. The fun of the thing was in- 
fectious. The song finished, we ventured another, 
and Patti joined us in the refrains of a medley of 
music-hall airs, beginning with London's latest 
mania, "Daisy Bell, or a Bicycle Built for Two", 
and winding up with Chevalier's "Old Kent Road" 
and the "Coster's Serenade", Coborn's "Man That 
Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo", and somebody 
else's "Daddy Would n't Buy me a Bow- Wow." 

Patti turned with an arch look. "You will think 
our behaviour abominable." 

"No, I don't. I think it jolly. Besides, it 's not 
everybody who has heard you sing comic songs." 

Her answer was a peal of laughter, and then she 
sat there, singing very softly a stanza of "My Old 
Kentucky Home", and as we finished the chorus 
she lifted a clear, sweet note, which thrilled us 
through and through and stirred us to excited 
applause. 

"What have I done?" Patti put the question 
with a puzzled air. 

The reply came from the adjoining library : 
"High E." One of our number had run to the 
piano. 



PATTI 69 

Then I recalled what Sir Morell Mackenzie had 
told me a little while before he died. We were 
chatting in that famous room of his in Harley 
Street, and we happened to mention Madame 
Patti. "She has the most wonderful throat I have 
ever seen," said Sir Morell. "It is the only one I 
have ever seen with the vocal cords in absolutely 
perfect condition after many years of use. They 
are not strained, or warped or roughened, but as 
I tell you, they are perfect. There is no reason 
why they should not remain so ten years longer, and 
with care and health twenty years longer." 

Remembering this, I asked Patti if she had taken 
extraordinary care of her voice. 

"I have never tired it," said she; "I never sing 
when I am tired, and that means I am never tired 
when I sing. And I have never strained for high 
notes. I have heard that the first question asked 
of new vocalists nowadays is 'How high can you 
sing?' But I have always thought that the least 
important matter in singing. One should sing only 
what one can sing with perfect ease." 

"But in eating and drinking.? According to all 
accounts, you are the most abstemious person in 
the world." 

"No, indeed! I avoid very hot and very cold 
dishes, otherwise I eat and drink whatever I like. 
My care is chiefly to avoid taking cold and to avoid 
indigestion. But these are the ordinary precautions 
of one who knows that health is the key to happiness." 

"And practising? Have you rigid rules for that? 
One hears of astounding exercise and self-denial." 



70 LONDON DAYS 

"Brilliant achievements in fiction. For practising 
I run a few scales twenty minutes a day. After a 
long professional tour I let my voice rest for a month 
and do not practise at all during that time." 

During my visit to Craig-y-Nos we usually spent 
our evenings in the billiard rooms. There w^ere 
two, an English room and a French one. In the 
French room there was a large orchestrion which 
had been built in Geneva for Madame Patti. It 
was operated by electricity and was said to be the 
finest instrument of its kind. Our hostess would 
start it of an evening, and the ingenious contrivance 
would "discourse most eloquent music" from a 
repertoire of one hundred and sixteen pieces, in- 
cluding arias from grand operas, military marches 
and simple ballads. Music, of course, is the fasci- 
nator that Patti cannot resist. The simplest melody 
stirs her to song. In the far corner from the or- 
chestrion she would sit in a big easy-chair, and hum 
the air that rolled from the organ pipes, keeping 
time with her dainty feet, or moving her head as 
the air grew livelier. Or she would send forth some 
larklike trill, or urge the young people to a dance, or 
a chorus, and when every one was tuned to the full 
pitch of melody and merriment, she would join in 
the fun as heartily as the rest. I used to sit and 
watch her play the castanets, or hear her snatch an 
air or two from "Martha", "Lucia", or " Traviata." 

One night the younger fry were chanting negro 
melodies, and Patti came into the room, warbling 
as if possessed by an ecstasy. "I love those darky 
songs," said she, and straightway she sang to us, 



PATTI 71 

with that Inimitable clarity and tenderness which 
were hers alone, "Way Down upon the Suwanee 
River", "Massa's in the Col', Col' Ground", and 
after that "Home, Sweet Home", while all of us 
listeners felt more than we cared to show. 

Guests at Craig-y-Nos were the most fortunate of 
mortals. If the guest were a man, a valet was told 
off to attend him ; if the guest were a lady, a maid 
was placed at her service. Breakfast was served 
in one's room at any hour one chose. Patti never 
came down before high noon. She rose at half- 
past eight, but remained until twelve in her apart- 
ments, going through her correspondence with her 
secretary and practising a little music. At half- 
past twelve luncheon was served in the glass pa- 
vilion. After that hour a guest was free to follow 
his own devices until dinner time. He might go 
shooting, fishing, riding, walking, or he might stroll 
about the lovely demesne, and see what manner of 
heavenly nook nature and Patti had made for them- 
selves among the hills of Wales. Patti 's castle is 
in every sense a palatial dwelling. She saw it 
fifteen years before I did, fell in love with it, pur- 
chased it, and subsequently expended great sums 
in enlarging it. The castellated mansion, with the 
theatre at one end and the pavilion and winter 
garden at the other, has a frontage of fully a thou- 
sand feet along the terraced banks of the Tawe. 
But the place has been so often described that it is 
unnecessary to repeat that oft-told story, or to give 
details of the gasworks, the electric-lighting station, 
the ice plant and cold-storage rooms, the steam 



72 LONDON DAYS 

laundry, the French and Enghsh kitchens, the 
stables, the carriage houses, the fifty servants, or 
of the watchfulness, care, devotion, which surrounded 
the melodious mistress of this miniature kingdom. 
Those matters are a part of the folklore of England 
and America. 

But I must say something of Patti's little theatre. 
It was her special and particular delight. She got 
more pleasure from it than from any other of the 
many possessions at Craig-y-Nos. It was a gem of 
a theatre, well proportioned and exquisitely deco- 
rated. Not only could the sloping floor be quickly 
raised, so that the auditorium might become a 
ballroom, but the appurtenances of the stage were 
elaborate and complete. For this statement I had 
the authority of the stage manager of the Royal 
Opera House at Co vent Garden. This expert was 
supervising certain alterations at the Patti theatre 
while I was at Craig-y-Nos, and he told me that the 
house then contained every accessory for the pro- 
duction of forty operas ! 

Patti sang occasionally at concerts in her theatre. 
All her life she treasured her voice for the public; 
she had never exhausted it by devising an excess of 
entertainment for her personal friends. And so 
most of the performances in the little theatre were 
pantomimic. Although Patti seemed to me always 
to be humming and singing while I was at the Castle, 
yet there was nothing of the "performing" order 
in what she did. She merely went singing softly 
about the house, or joining in our choruses, like a 
happy child. 



PATTI 73 

One morning, while a dozen of us were sitting in 
the shade of the terrace, the ladies with their fancy 
work, the men with their papers, books, and cigars, 
we heard, from an open window above, a burst of 
song, full-throated like a bird's. It was for all the 
world like the song of a skylark, of glorious ecstasy, 
as if the bird were mounting in the air, the merrier 
as it soared the higher, until it poured from an in- 
visible height a shower of joyous melody. No one 
amongst us stirred, or made a sound. La Diva 
thought us far away up the valley, where we had 
planned an excursion, but we had postponed the 
project to a cooler day. We remained silent, 
listening. Our unseen entertainer seemed to be 
flitting about her boudoir, singing as she flitted, 
snatching a bar or two from this opera and that, 
revelling in the fragment of a ballad, or trilling a 
few notes like our friend the lark. Presently she 
ceased, and we were about to move, when she began 
to sing *'Comin' Thro' the Rye." She was alone 
in her room, but she was singing as gloriously as if 
to an audience of ten thousand in the Albert Hall. 
The unsuspected group of listeners on the terrace 
slipped then from their own control, and took to 
vigorous applause and cries of "brava, brava." 

*'0h, oh, oh !" cried the birdlike voice above. 

We looked up, and saw Patti leaning out at the 
casement. 

"Oh," said she, "I couldn't help it, really I 
could n't. I 'm so happy !" 

At luncheon she proposed an entertainment in 
the theatre for the evening of the following day. 



74 LONDON DAYS 

We were to have " Camille " in pantomime. The 
preparations moved swiftly. Among the guests 
were several capable amateur actors. The per- 
formance began a little after ten. Some musicians 
were brought from Swansea. A dozen gentlefolk 
hastily summoned from the valley, those among the 
guests who were not enrolled for the pantomime, and 
a gallery full of cottagers and servants made up the 
audience. We had "an opera" in five acts of 
pantomime, with orchestra, and all together it was 
fun. Of course, Patti carried off the honours. 
There was supper after the play, and the sunlight 
crept into the Swansea Valley within two hours 
after we had risen from table. 

I said to Patti after the pantomime, "You don't 
seem to believe that change of occupation is the best 
possible rest. You seem to work as hard at re- 
hearsing and acting in your little theatre as if you 
were 'on tour.'" 

"Not quite! Besides, it isn't work, it's play," 
replied the miraculous little woman. "I love the 
theatre. And, then, there is always something to 
learn about acting. I find these pantomime per- 
formances useful as well as amusing." 

Every afternoon about three o'clock Patti and 
her guests went for a drive, a small procession of 
landaus and brakes rattling along the smooth 
country roads. You could see at once that this 
was Pattiland. The cottagers came to their doors 
and saluted her Melodious Majesty, and the children 
of the countryside ran out and threw kisses. 

"Oh! the dears," exclaimed the kind-hearted 



PATTI 75 

Queen, as we were driving toward the village of 
Ystradgynlais (they call it something like "Ist-rag- 
dun-las"), one afternoon. "I would like to build 
another castle and put all those mites into it, and 
let them live there with music and flowers ! " And 
I believe she would have given orders for such a 
castle straightway, had there been a builder in sight. 
On the way home Patti promised me "a surprise" 
for the evening. I wondered what it might be, and 
when the non-appearance of the ladies kept the 
gentlemen waiting in the drawing-room at dinner 
time, I was the more puzzled. The men, to pass 
the time, inspected the "trophies" of the prima 
donna. It would be impossible to enumerate them 
because Craig-y-Nos Castle was another South 
Kensington Museum in respect to the treasures it 
held. Every shelf, table, and cabinet was packed 
with gifts which Patti had received from all parts 
of the earth, from monarchs and millionaires, princes 
and peasants, old friends and strangers. There was 
Marie Antoinette's watch, to begin with, and there 
were portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 
to end with. There was a remarkable collection 
of portraits of royal personages, presented to Patti 
by the distinguished originals on the occasion of 
her marriage to M. Nicolini. Photographs of the 
Grand Old Man of Politics and the Grand Old Man 
of Music rested side by side on a little table presented 
by some potentate. Gladstone's likeness bore his 
autograph and the inscription, "Co?2 tanti e tanti 
Complimenti" ; Verdi's, his autograph and a fervent 
tribute written at Milan. There were crowns and 



76 LONDON DAYS 

wreaths and rare china; there were paintings and 
plate, and I know not what, wherever one looked. 

If one were to make Patti a gift, and he had a 
King's ransom to purchase it, he would find it 
difiScult to give her anything that would be a novelty, 
or that would be unique in her eyes. She had every- 
thing. For my part, I would pluck a rose from her 
garden, or gather a nosegay from a hedgerow, and 
it would please her as much as if it were a diadem. 
She valued the thought that prompted the giving, 
rather than the gift itself. She never forgot even 
the smallest act of kindness that was done for her 
sake. And she was always doing kindnesses for 
others. I have heard from the Welsh folk many 
tales of her generosity. And to her friends she was 
the most open-handed of women. 

There was one dark, drizzly day during the visit 
to Craig-y-Nos. It mattered little to the men. 
The wet did not interfere with their amusements. 
But every lady wore some precious jewel that Patti 
had given her that morning, — a ring, a brooch, a 
bracelet, as the case might be. For the generous 
creature thought her fair friends would be disap- 
pointed because they could not get out of doors. 
How could she know that every one in the Castle 
welcomed the rain because it meant a few hours 
more with Patti ? 

The "surprise" she had spoken of was soon ap- 
parent. The ladies came trooping into the drawing- 
room wearing the gowns and jewels of Patti's 
operatic roles. Patti herself came last, in "Leo- 
nora's" white and jewels. What a dinner-party we 



PATTI 77 

had that night, — we men, in the prim black and 
white of evening dress, sitting there with "Leonora" 
and "Desdemona" and "Marguerite" and "Rachel" 
and "Lucia" and "Carmen" and "Dinorah", and 
I know not how many more ! Nobody but Patti 
would have thought of such merry masquerading, or, 
having thought of it, would or could have gone to the 
trouble of providing it. 

Of course, we talked of her favourite characters 
in opera, and then of singers she had known. She 
said it would give her real pleasure to hear Mario 
and Grisi again, or, coming to later days, Scalchi 
and Annie Louise Carey. The latter, being an 
American and a friend, I was glad to hear this 
appreciation of her from the Queen of Song. " Carey 
and Scalchi were the two greatest contraltos I have 
known ; and I have sung with both of them. I 
remember Annie Louise Carey as a superb artist 
and a sweet and noble woman." 

I said "Hear, hear," in the parliamentary manner, 
and then Patti added : 

"Now we will go to the theatre again. There is 
to be another entertainment." It was, of all un- 
expected things, a lantern show. Patti's arrange- 
ment for that was, like everything else at Craig-y- 
Nos, from her piano to her pet parrot, the only one 
of its kind. It was capable of giving, with all sorts 
of "mechanical effects", a two hours' entertain- 
ment every night for two months without repeating 
a scene. Patti invited me to sit beside her and 
watch the dissolving views. It seemed to me that 
it would be like this to sit beside Queen Victoria 



78 LONDON DAYS 

during a "State performance" at Windsor, only 
not half so much fun ! Here was Patti Imperatrice, 
dressed like a queen, wearing a crown of diamonds, 
and attended by her retinue of brilliantly attired 
women and attentive gentlemen of the court. And 
it was so like her to cause the entertainment to end 
with a series of American views and to sing for me 
"Home, Sweet Home", as we looked out on New 
York harbour from a steamship inward bound. 

The next morning I started from Craig-y-Nos for 
America. As the dogcart was tugged slowly up 
the mountain side, the Stars and Stripes saluted me 
from the Castle tower, waving farewell as I withdrew 
from my peep at Paradise. 



CHAPTER VII 

JOHN STUART BLACKIE 

The wind was from the east, the Scotch "mist" 
from everywhere, but Professor Blackie had a sunny 
heart that made one forget the raw weather. I 
thought the sun was shining and the skies blue when 
I went to lunch at Number 9 Douglas Crescent, 
Edinburgh, one November day in the early nineties. 

Almost any day in half a century you might have 
seen Professor Blackie striding through Edinburgh 
as strong as an athlete, hearty as a young hunter. 
One morning I encountered him as he was beating 
eastward against half a gale, his cape flying, his cloud 
of white hair tossing against his big-brimmed, soft 
black hat, his cheeks rosy with the winter wind, and 
his kind eyes dancing with the delight he felt in 
exercise. He was eighty-five ! 

I told him of reading somewhere that he loved to 
play the peripatetic philosopher. How he laughed ! 
"Do they say that of me.'' Ho, ho, ho!" And 
then he trolled a "Hi-ti-rumty-tum", snatching an 
air, as his habit was, from a half-forgotten song, 
and ending with an exclamatory line of Greek. He 
looked like a prophet apostrophising the gods. 

"And they say I speak 'a confusion of tongues.' 



80 LONDON DAYS 

Don't mind that," said he. "Greek, Latin, Gaelic, 
German, English — all are one to me. I borrow the 
words that come readiest for the thought. But 
Greek is the great language." And he strode down 
the hill. 

He was the most picturesque figure then living 
in Edinburgh, and many thought him the greatest 
man in the Scotland of those times. He was the 
"Grand Old Man" of that northern kingdom, and 
in vitality and spirits and capacity for work he was 
at eighty-five the youngest man I knew. He was 
packed with wisdom and overflowing with music 
and merriment. If he had not been so musical and 
so merry you might have called him Scotland in- 
carnate. Doubtless he was that, with the music 
and merriment added. As for character, even Scot- 
land never produced a nobler one, nor set it in a more 
imposing figure, or in a grander head. Scholar, poet, 
philosopher, teacher, learner, political writer, lover of 
the classics, strenuous believer in modern progress, 
he was sure that the world was never better than in 
his day, the Victorian day, and that it was growing 
better steadily. They were all optimists then. 
Lord Salisbury, when prime minister, added that 
they were all socialists. Professor Blackie drew the 
line at that. Perhaps Salisbury was quoting Har- 
court. 

Visiting in Glasgow, I received one morning a 
note from him inviting me to lunch at his house in 
Edinburgh. On the lower, left-hand corner of the 
envelope he had written a line of Greek, as his 
custom was. This time it was an adjuration : 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 81 

"Speak the truth in love." But who could speak 
of him in other words than those of love? In his 
note he had written "Come and talk." But he 
did all the talking. What an inspiring flood it was ! 

No sooner was I in his hall than I heard, to my 
disappointment, the sound of what seemed lively 
conversation from an adjoining room. I had hoped 
to find him alone. The prospect of a luncheon 
party dampened my ardour. But when the maid 
conducted me to the presence, there sat the Scottish 
sage alone, declaiming a Gaelic poem. At least he 
told me it was Gaelic ! 

"Laugh," cried he, "laugh. 'T will do ye good. 
Ah, y' are . one o' the laughin' men ! I like 
them. Try a man; will he no' laugh, or smile, 
don't tie to him. There 's too much gloom in the 
world." 

What a picture he was in that hour. Yes, and 
hours after, when I left him. The tall old man with 
strong, smooth-shaven face, like one of the tra- 
ditional gods of his favourite lore, but in no other 
respect resembling a mythological being. His head 
was crowned, not with laurel, but with a wide- 
brimmed Panama or leghorn hat, beneath which 
streamed his long white hair. And his body was 
lost iji the embraces of a blue dressing-gown which 
came to his heels ; and around his waist were yards 
of red silk sash, the ends of which trailed behind him. 

"Punctual," said he. "You are sharp to the 
minute. Came by the eleven train, eh? An hour 
and five minutes on the rail. Wonderful how we 
live now ! Glasgow to Edinburgh and return, 



82 LONDON DAYS 

ninety-six miles for seven shillings and sixpence, 
first class. The quickest travelling in the world, 
and the cheapest. That 's one thing the auld 
Greeks could na' do. Fol-de-rol-de-rol-de-ri. Prog- 
ress, progress ; I believe in it. I 'm a marching 
man. There 's nae such thing as standin' still ; 
you go forward, or you fall back. Will ye ring the 
bell ? I thank ye ! Bachelor's hall the day. My 
wife is in the country, but we will try to be com- 
fortable." 

While we ate Professor Blackie talked, burst into 
snatches of melody, rippled in Greek, or thundered 
in German, or gave the dear twist of Scotland to 
his words, or, when he thought there had been 
enough of that, drew from the "well of English, 
pure and undefiled." And all the time he wore his 
hat! 

"You won't mind, I know," he said. "Eighty- 
five and no glasses to my eyes. There 's protection 
in the shade of a hat's brim. Eighty-five and no 
glasses ! The only proof I 'm eighty -five is the 
almanac. There 's no proof in my body. I 'm as 
young as ever there." And then he turned the 
Greek tap so that Aristotle larded the lunch. 

He had been in love with Greek for more than sixty 
years ; he taught it for thirty or forty years ; he 
knew it as well as he knew English ; he read modern 
Greek newspapers ; he had the best Greek library 
in the kingdom ; I daresay he dreamed in Greek. 
I said : "You talk as if, in spirit, you were more a 
Greek than a Scotsman." 

"Not that" — he half sang the words— "Oh, 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 83 

bonny Scotland for me. A man should stick to the 
land where God put him !" 

He drew the knife along the breast of a chicken. 
"My wife won't let me carve when she 's at home," 
he said. He looked threateningly at a joint. "Never 
mind, never mind," said he, and then in a chant, 
"hey nonny, hi nonny." Pause. Then "Come off, 
old boy," and a wing and a leg clattered to the 
platter. "The nearer the bone the sweeter the 
meat," said he. "But statesmen have carved em- 
pires more easily." 

"Mr. Gladstone, for example," said I, referring 
to the Home Rule Bill. 

"Ho, there ; but he has n't performed the amputa- 
tion!" 

"You don't agree with your old friend about that 
policy .''" 

"No, nor about Greek. But we are friends still. 
As for discussion, we began that when we first met. 
How many tens of years ago was that.'^ We have 
been discussing ever since. Yes, forty years ! We 
met at Dean Ramsey's house. Gladstone was a 
splendid man to disagree with even then." 

As Professor Blackie talked of his friends, the 
names of nearly all his contemporaries in England, 
Scotland, and Germany came hurrying forth. But 
he would n't tell anecdotes about them for two 
reasons ; first, he never remembered good stories ; 
second, "I don't live in the past," he said. He was 
not a good talker, if good talk means keeping up 
your end in conversation. He kept up more than 
his end. He was always ready for a monologue. 



84 LONDON DAYS 

He did n't converse, he exploded. His utterances 
were volcanic. There would come an eruption of 
short sentences blazing with philosophy ; then a 
kindly glow over it all, and the discharge would 
subside quickly with a gentle rumty-tum, or a snatch 
from some old Scotch ballad. We had been talking 
of education. Suddenly the table shook under a 
smiting hand, and these words were shot at me : 

" Teaching ! We are teaching our young men 
everything except this : to teach themselves, and to 
look the Lord Jesus Christ in the face ! You are 
doing it in America, too. You are as bad as we are 
in Britain," And then immediately, and with a 
seraph's smile, "May I pass you a wing.^*" 

He quoted from one of his books, a recent one : 
"Of all the chances that can befall a young man at 
his first start in the race of life, the greatest un- 
questionably is to be brought into contact, and, if 
possible, to enter into familiar relations with a 
truly great man. For this is to know what man- 
hood means, and a manly life, not by grave precept, 
or wise proverb, or ideal picture ; but to see the 
ideal in complete equipment and compact in reality 
before you, as undeniably and as eflBciently as the 
sun that sheds light from the sky, or the mountain 
that sheds waters into the glen." 

Strong influences were about Blackie's life in his 
youth, and he became, in his turn, a great influence 
in other lives. He was the son of a Scotch banker, 
and was born in Glasgow. He had his first school- 
ing in Aberdeen, and he entered college at twelve 
and the University of Edinburgh at fifteen. At 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 85 

the latter place he studied under John Wilson 
("Christopher North"). At Aberdeen he had the 
best Latin instruction of his time. There they were 
famous Latinists. At the University of Edinburgh 
it was mainly religion with him, and the Bible his 
favourite reading. At twenty he went to Germany, 
the Germany that is dead. His strong grave face 
would light up when he spoke of the men he had 
known there. 

*'Niebuhr was the biggest man Germany has 
produced, but Bunsen was the greatest all round. 
Bunsen looked like Goethe. I told him so, and 
found that others thought so. But Bunsen had 
a sweeter mouth than Goethe. My father's teaching, 
the nature that God gave me, and Bunsen's in- 
fluence, have been the shaping forces of my life. 

"I returned to Scotland, was called to the bar 
at twenty-five, and ran away from it at thirty. I 
was not meant for a lawyer. Aberdeen University 
made me its Professor of Latin Literature, and I 
kept at that till 1852, when Edinburgh appointed 
me Professor of Greek. I was thirty years at that 
time. A few years ago I retired. There is the story 
of my life." 

No. Only the story of the shell of his life. It 
said nothing of what he had done. 

"Done!" exclaimed the old man. "If you live 
to be as old as John Blackie, you '11 find it less im- 
portant to know what a man has done than to know 
what he is. Done ? I 've taught Greek, written a 
little, preached a good deal !" 

But many men teach Greek, and everybody writes 



86 LONDON DAYS 

nowadays, and the globe is a vast pulpit from which 
all who are not dumb try to preach, while only the 
deaf long to listen. John Stuart Blackie's achieve- 
ments are not to be measured by phrases. He was 
one of the strong teachers of men. Many men now 
celebrated have told me that they studied under 
him and learned little Greek but more wisdom than 
an entire faculty could teach them, or any number 
of books. "The art of the teacher is to teach the 
student to teach himself ", the old man was fond of 
saying. 

Blackie was a marching man, you will remember. 
For years he marched across Scotland, and up and 
down, lecturing the people. If Scotland had a hall 
in which he did not lecture on Burns, on Goethe, 
on Scottish Song, Education, Government — to his 
list of themes there was no end — it must have been 
built since his death. No wonder they called him a 
"peripatetic philosopher." 

He said to me : " I think I can do more good by 
speaking to people than by writing to them. I have 
written thirty or forty volumes, if you count the 
little ones, but I don't know how to write books 
to please the public." 

"How can that be?" I asked. "A bookseller 
told me that your * Self-Culture ' has already run 
to thirty editions." 

"Oh, that was not written for the public, but for 
my students ; and the public happened to like it." 

"A distinction without much difference then." 
And I thought of his "Essays on Social Subjects", 
"Four Phases of Morals", "Homer and the Iliad", 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 87 

and the book "On Beauty"; of his "Songs of Re- 
ligion and Life", "The Language and Literature 
of the Scottish Highlands", "Musa Burschicosa", 
"Songs and Legends of Ancient Greece", "Scottish 
Song", "Poetical Tracts", and so on. The public 
had seemed to like them. And the public of Edin- 
burgh must have found some attraction in his novel 
"Altavona", for, he said, "They made a great row 
over it here, thought they had identified one of the 
characters, and went buzzing about over their dis- 
covery. But I 'm not a novelist. I was trying to 
effect reform in the Scottish Land Laws. I believe 
in Home Rule for Scotland," he added. 

"Why not, then, for Ireland ?" This was putting 
one's head into the lion's mouth. But he purred 
gently: "I don't know Ireland! I've been there 
only once!" That was a fair hit at Gladstone. 
"Scotland I do know!" The last words came like 
a blast from the mountains. 

Once on a time Professor Blackie printed a list 
of one hundred and twelve Scottish songs, and he 
declared that every Scotsman should know them 
all. I suppose it was patriotism even more than a 
love of learning that impelled him to raise £10,000 
by four years' labour, and endow with it, at Edin- 
burgh, a Professorship of Celtic Literature. 

He lived on an edge of Edinburgh, and his house 
overflowed with books and pictures. It commanded 
a northerly outlook, and the country rolled up almost 
to the windows. "Look there," said he, pointing 
to the big window of the dining room, "the sun's 
out, and you can see the Fife Hills. I see them about 



88 LONDON DAYS 

three times a month when our mists lift. The 
Forth Bridge is yonder" — pointing. "Wonderful 
thing that Forth Bridge. You whiz through towards 
Perth in five minutes !" 

Above the fireplace was a large portrait of him- 
self, painted years before by James Archer, of the 
Royal Scottish Academy. It represented its sub- 
ject gazing, with head uncovered, at a mountainous 
landscape. "That 's the poetic Blackie," said the 
original, "the Blackie who loves to roam hills and 
glens. Yon is Blackie militant," pointing to a 
severer portrait on the opposite wall. "A very 
different person, as you see. A painter can show 
only one aspect of a character in a single portrait, 
and the public, seeing but one portrait, will see but 
one side of the character. That 's why there are 
several Blackies on these walls. Come and see my 
friends as they hang." 

He led the way to the entrance hall whose walls 
were hung with paintings, engravings, photographs, 
old prints. A bust of "Christopher North" oc- 
cupied a pedestal at the foot of the stairs. "And 
there 's Nolly," sang the Professor, pointing to an 
oil likeness of Cromwell. We would take a step or 
two, and then pause to look at a portrait, while my 
energetic host threw out an explanatory phrase 
whimsically abbreviating the names of the men he 
liked best. "Tom," said he, "Tom Carlyle, a 
tyrannical genius who did a lot of good in a hard 
way. Bobbie," and he stopped before a portrait 
of Burns, "Bobbie was a ploughman, but the artist 
here made him a dandy, and he never was that." 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 89 

We must have stopped twenty times on the first 
flight of stairs, and at each pause the old man would 
shoot a remark. At the drawing-room door he 
paused again, exclaiming: "Aristotle, Shakespeare, 
Goethe, and the Apostle Paul — these are my 
heroes !" 

The drawing-room was a national, or rather an 
international portrait gallery in little. We began 
with a line of faces at one end of which was Goethe, 
at the other end Bunsen. There were portraits 
everywhere, on the walls, in the chairs, on the 
tables; some of them rested on the floor. Sir 
Henry Irving as Becket had a chair. Blackie 
stopped in front of him. "That 's a man who has 
done a great work," said he. "The people require 
amusement, and Irving has amused them nobly. 
Ah, you see Mary Anderson over there. A mar- 
vellous sweet woman. Scott's next to her on that 
wall, now. Ah, no, I never saw him. I wish I had 
known him. ' Green grow the rushes, O ! ' Here 
are some preachers — Chalmers, John Knox, Guthrie, 
Norman Macleod, Cardinal Manning. Ye '11 think 
it a queer assortment, maybe, John Ejiox and Man- 
ning. Well, the five o' them were men, man, men !" 

"Dear, dear, who has done this thing?" he cried, 
as if startled. We stood before an easel which held 
a portrait of himself. An engraving of Gladstone 
stood beneath, on the floor. " Wrong ! It 's the 
wrong order," said he. "We must change it. Down 
goes Blackie ; up goes Gladdy. He belongs above 
me." He suited the action to the word and shifted 
the portraits. 



90 LONDON DAYS 

Presently we marched up another flight of stairs 
to his study, which consisted of three connecting 
rooms lined with books. "This is where I live," 
he said. "Seven thousand volumes hereabout. 
See the Greek here, here, everywhere. Man, man, 
Greek is the only living bridge between the present 
and the past !" 

Then, snatching up a handful of newspapers from 
Athens, he continued, "Some folks call Greek a 
dead language. Poor souls ! They don't know any 
better. These things should interest you. They 
are fresh from Athens; not a week old." And 
then he read aloud from them, a bit of politics, an 
advertisement, lines from the bargain counter, as if 
to show that one touch of shopping makes the whole 
world kin. "But no heroes, man, no heroes! 
There 's no Aristotle now, no Shakespeare, no 
Goethe, no Apostle Paul !" 

We sat awhile in the study, and Blackie "sur- 
veyed mankind from China to Peru" in lightning 
flashes. He always left one panting behind, breath- 
less, trying to keep pace with his rushing thoughts. 
He had done that sort of thing all his teaching life, 
and that was why men said they learned but little 
Greek from him, but absorbed streams of wisdom. 
They would say that when teaching, he never stuck 
to his text. The best you could do was quietly to 
watch and listen, remember and apply. After all, 
that was what he wanted men to do — to learn to 
teach themselves. 

There are men, very distinguished men, who are 
much more easily described than John Stuart Blackie. 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 91 

What he said of the portrait painter is equally true 
of the portrait writer. I might borrow his own 
phrase and say that there was the preacher, there 
was the teacher, the patriot, the man of merry soul ; 
and there was the Blackie of odd moments who was 
all these in one, as I saw him, with straw hat, blue 
dressing-robe, and trailing red sash. If I picture 
him as I saw him then, going about the house in his 
queer gear and genially nicknaming great folk in 
the intervals of snatches of song, you are not to 
think of him as merely an eccentric and entertaining 
old gentleman. He was very much at his ease, and 
he made me feel happily so. He was natural man 
without a pose, without an affectation. He never 
posed. He did not care what others thought or said 
about him, what he cared for was what they thought 
and said about his subject, whatever that might be 
— country, or religion, or song — and it all led to 
manliness. "Be a man! Be God's man!" That 
was the burden of his teaching, preaching, writing, 
scholarship, philosophy, religion. He wrought great 
things for the manhood of Scotland. 

I remember his coming to Glasgow one night while 
I visited there. He lectured for some society of 
young men. His theme was Love. When he had 
finished, a minister jumped up and shouted this 
invitation : 

"Put that into a sermon, sir, and come and preach 
it to us next Sabbath. A guinea and a bed ! " 

"What?" roared Blackie. "D'ye think I'd 
preach the Gospel for money ? I '11 preach it for 
nothing if ye '11 come and listen !" 



92 LONDON DAYS 

Sometimes they said he was a droll person who 
went about Scotland cracking jokes. And I have 
heard them say that he "played too much to the 
gallery." But the men who said those things liked 
their sermons delivered by long-faced folk, and 
wanted their lectures peppered with piety. They 
had their suspicions of laughter. Blackie bubbled 
over with good spirits. Others might make the 
public sigh and weep; he knew that it is better to 
make them laugh; that if you make them "feel 
good" they will like you well enough to listen to 
what you have to say and think about it. As for 
"playing to the gallery" one has only to recall 
Blackie's life-long admonitions to Democracy in 
order to see the error of that assumption. 

The best word-picture of John Stuart Blackie was 
unknown to the public at the time of which I write. 
It was unknown even to Blackie himself at that 
time. It was written by one of his pupils, Robert W. 
Barbour, a brilliant and scholarly man. His "Letters, 
Poems, and Pensees" appeared subsequently in a 
volume edited by Professor Drummond, a memorial 
volume circulated privately. It was with Pro- 
fessor Drummond's permission that I published, 
years ago, an extract from one of Barbour's letters. 
Barbour, when it was written, was in charge of a 
school somewhere in the Highlands. One day his 
old master, Blackie, came up from Edinburgh for a 
blow of the mountain air and a visit to Barbour, who 
thus described the occasion : 

"Then follow minutes of Elysium, were life only 
the Academy, and the world made for students and 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 93 

Professors ! I hear Professor Blackie talk of foreign 
travel, of the pictures it gives to hang forever in 
one's after-study ; and as the brave old snowy head 
falls back against the claret of the sofa, he brings 
me out, one by one, the pictures — Rome, Florence, 
Milan, Gottingen — latest hung therein. 

"After dinner the Professor and I have an hour 
and a half's stroll to the school, while I drink in the 
delightful desultoriness of his talk, and try to stop 
just when he does — which is not always easy ; 
for you cannot tell why this crystus should seize 
his fancy, or that 'potentilla' interrupt his thought. 
But it only breaks to flower forth again more beauti- 
ful, as he talks first of Italy, its grace we lack so in 
Scotland, its lack of sternness we could so well 
supply ; its few great hearts alive and active, its 
multitudes asleep and slow ; then of its new litera- 
ture ; then the political parties ; then what poets 
should do now, not to be so sundered from their 
time as Browning (who walked these roads), nor so 
bound to the mere accident of rhyme. Let poets 
write short, sympathetic lives of men ; let them 
write history, not stories. 

"And so we come to the school where the Pro- 
fessor has half an hour of cross-questioning the best 
scholar, to the advantage of the whole school ; and 
such happy definitions, and such funny 'pokes' 
with the mind and the walking-stick, and such in- 
structive similes and amusing information. They 
are rather annoyed when I tell them how great a 
man my master is. Then they sing to him in good 
Scotch to his heart's desire. . . . 



94 LONDON DAYS 

"At last he rises, and asking them something in a 
GaeHc too good, or bad, or both (or rather book- 
born), to be understanded of them, he breaks into a 
beautiful Gaelic lament, while the whole little 
audience stands open-mouthed, eyed, and eared, 
and hardly recovers to whisper * Good-bye, sir', ere 
he and I are out into the air again. 

"I apologise for having given him such little work 
for so long, and he hums out something in German, 
which he breaks half sternly to say : * There are four 
things a man must love — children, flowers, woman,' 
and, must I say it? 'wine.' He went on to tell me 
how hateful and horrible a nature Napoleon's always 
had seemed to him. Napoleon said: *I love noth- 
ing, I love not woman, I love not dice, I love not 
wine, I love not politics.' 

"Then the hill came, and with the hill our thoughts 
could not help climbing. Was I licensed ? No, 
not ordained yet, of course. Would I preach the 
splendid possibilities in man, to sink to the beasts 
which perish, or to rise to heaven itself.'^ He did 
not deny that the heart was deceitful and desperately 
wicked, but should we not call on men to realise for 
what they were made. . . . No man understands 
others, he said, who does not leave himself more 
behind, and go and sit by others, wherever they 
may be. 

"He could not say what Greek one should read 
who had few books and less time. 'No, read only 
where the heart runs ; read nothing except that 
about which you are passionate . . .' So I got no 
lists of authors or works. 'Read where you are 



JOHN STUART BLACKIE 95 

thinking; don't read where you are not feehng.' 
This and much more on war, churches, architecture, 
youth and new opinions in theology, and materialism 
(he had read some of the latter ; he could n't for 
the life of him remember it) and philosophy. 

"He talked," continues Barbour, "and I treasured 
up. But most on the three tongues, and what was 
work for poets. Then came afternoon tea and 
raillery between him and my mother. Then they 
packed into the pony phaeton — my professor a 
perfect picture, his broad leghorn bright with a 
flower, scarlet of seedum, fringed by golden yew, and 
the ladies a good background." 

So you see, it was the same John Stuart Blackie 
years and years before. "Do stay to tea, man!" 
he urged, when I said I must be going, that there 
would be just time to catch such-and-such a train 
for Glasgow where an appointment was to be kept. 

"Ah, then punctuality's the word. Be late and 
be nothing." He came down to the front door with 
me, his leghorn flapping, his sash-ends trailing on 
the stairs. There were volcanic salutations to por- 
traits which we had missed when going up. I said 
good-bye to the Grand Old Man of Scotland. 

"Good-bye," said he, "and dinna forget — Aris- 
totle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Apostle Paul — 
my heroes !" 

In the gathering dusk I descended the steps, as 
he stood in the open doorway, singing, and gazing 
towards the Corstorphine Hill. 



CHAPTER VIII 

LORD KELVIN 

He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of 
his house, making difficult calculations and strange 
diagrams in a little book bound in green morocco. 
It would be five minutes before the carriage started, 
and he recollected that fact just as he reached the 
door and had put on his overcoat. Another man, 
almost any other, would have idled while the five 
minutes passed, and most men, especially busy men, 
would have fussed nervously at having to wait when 
they were ready. But Lord Kelvin, being the busiest 
of men, never wasted time by fussing, and never lost 
it in idling. Having five minutes he would solve a 
problem, so he pulled the memorandum book from 
his coat pocket, where he always carried it, and sat 
on the stair and worked. 

He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young 
as those of the youngest of his students. They say 
that a man is as old as his arteries. The saying 
might have originated with him, if it ever occurred 
to him that he had arteries. But I am not sure that 
the customary anatomy was not, in his case, rein- 
forced by an ingenious system of electrical conductors 
through which a mysterious energy was driven by 



LORD KELVIN 97 

his dynamic mind. Like all great teachers he was 
ever learning. But it would be difficult to say when 
he began to learn, for he was only ten years old when 
he entered the university ! And he was thoroughly 
equipped for entering upon his student work even 
at that age. At twenty-two he was appointed Pro- 
fessor of Natural Philosophy, and he held that 
professorship for the rest of his life ! 

Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural 
science in the nineteenth century. The twentieth 
century has not, thus far, produced his superior. 
He was born in 1824, he died in 1908. It was my 
privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of 
his life. A kinder man, one more considerate of the 
abysmal ignorance of the fellow creatures with whom 
he came into contact, could not be imagined. He 
was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even 
a Scottish pose, and it would be difficult, maybe 
impossible, to find a better embodiment of life 
than that. Scottish he was, though born in Ireland. 
And his fame was associated with that of Glasgow 
University which had the honour of receiving him 
into student life and which received the greater 
honour of his distinguished services for a period 
almost as long as the psalmist allots to the life of a 
man. 

When he was eighty-three he outlined, as, prob- 
ably, he had often outlined before, the plan of a boy's 
education. "By the age of twelve," said he, "a 
boy should have learned to write his own language 
with accuracy and some elegance ; he should have a 
reading knowledge of French, should be able to 



98 LONDON DAYS 

translate Latin and easy Greek authors, and should 
have some acquaintance with German. Having 
learned the meaning of words, a boy should study 
Logic. I never found that the small amount of 
Greek I learned w^as a hindrance to my acquiring 
some knowledge of Natural Philosophy." Sovie 
knowledge of it ! There, indeed, was modesty. For 
who had more knowledge of natural philosophy, or 
so much, as Lord Kelvin ? 

Is it necessary to say that he was not born to 
baronies ? Surely, that much all readers may be 
presumed to know, some wiseacre will remark. But 
if one were painting a portrait instead of writing it, 
nothing would be more futile than to omit the sub- 
ject's nose on the presumption that the public knew 

- he had one. William Thomson, who became Lord 
Kelvin, was born in Belfast, the younger of two 
brothers. The elder brother was James, and he 
became famous as a professor of engineering. He 
died, however, some fifteen years before his brother. 
James was named for his father, and that James, the 
father, was born on a farm near Ballynahinch, 
County Down. His Scotch ancestors had planted 
themselves in Ireland in the seventeenth and eigh- 

- teenth centuries. That farmer's boy had a huge 
hunger for knowledge. When he was eleven or 
twelve years old he taught himself, having no teacher 
to aid him, the principles of the sundial, so that he 

t could make dials for any latitude. Also, from books 
which he contrived to get, he learned the elements of 
mathematics. By and by he began teaching in a 
little school. He taught in the summers, and in 



LORD KELVIN 99 

the winters he studied at Glasgow University, con- 
tinuing to do so for five years, and then he was 
appointed a teacher in the Royal Academic Institute 
of Belfast. When his son William had reached the 
age of eight, the scholarly parent was appointed to 
the Professorship of Mathematics at Glasgow Uni- 
versity, a position he held for twenty years. His 
scientific attainments were high, and his classical 
scholarship was distinguished. He educated his 
sons himself, until each was ten, and then sent each 
to the university. Lord Kelvin said to me once, 
when we were talking of those early days : "I had a 
great father." 

The Kelvin is a little stream that winds through 
the grounds of Glasgow University. When Queen 
Victoria bestowed a peerage upon Sir William 
Thomson (she had knighted him many years before 
that) he chose for his title the name of the little 
stream by whose side he had spent his fruitful and 
illustrious life. His had been a life of labour, but 
it had been congenial labour. He had contributed 
vastly to the sum of human knowledge; he had 
invented useful things, to the amazement of pedantic 
men who think that science should remain with 
scientific persons and never be applied to the wants 
of the world ; at least, not applied by the scientific 
discoverer of the principles or things. But with all 
his theories he was a practical man, and he pros- 
pered. That day when he sat on the stair for five 
minutes, and concentrated the training of sixty 
years upon the page of a notebook, we went to 
White's. 



100 LONDON DAYS 

Once upon a time there was a White, a James 
White, who, in Glasgow, made instruments of preci- 
sion which found their way all over the world. And 
so he became the maker of various things that Sir 
William Thomson, afterward Lord Kelvin, had in- 
vented. W^hen White died, or retired, or possibly 
before that, Kelvin acquired his business and estab- 
lishment and continued the manufacture of instru- 
ments of precision, the establishment being conducted 
under White's name, as before, and as possibly it may 
be to this day. Anyhow, we went to White's, where 
Lord Kelvin took me into his laboratory and showed 
me, among other things, his "Siphon Recorder" 
which was very interesting, albeit very puzzling to 
the non-technical mind. I asked him what it did. 
The technical descriptions I had read were rather 
baflQing. His answer was : "The electric current in 
an under-sea cable, say an Atlantic cable, is very 
weak and weary. This reaches out from the shore, 
and helps it along, and writes down what it says." 
It was for this invention that he was knighted in 
1866. He had connected the hemispheres. 

He was one of the courageous and hopeful band 
that laid and worked the first Atlantic cables. Sub- 
marine telegraphy had been first employed in 1850 
when a line was laid across the English Channel 
between Dover and Calais. But the scientific 
camps were divided in opinion about the practica- 
bility of working across thousands of miles of ocean- 
bed. One faction declared it "beyond the resources 
of human skill." Robert Stephenson said the 
project could end only in failure. Of course, the 



LORD KELVIN 101 

moneyed men were timid. Most of them were more 
than timid ; they were scared. Faraday had found 
that the transmission of signals by submarine cable, 
on a line from Harwich to Holland, was not in- 
stantaneous. "The line leaked," said the financial 
men, "and most of the electricity that was pumped 
into it spilled into the sea. This does not occur on 
land lines," they said ; "we will not invest." 

William Thomson discovered and formulated "the 
law which governs the retardation of electrical sig- 
nals in submarine lines." Whitehouse found that 
with a line 1125 miles long, a signal required a second 
and a half for transmission. Thomson's law showed 
that on a line long enough to connect Ireland with 
Newfoundland the transmission of a signal would 
require six seconds. This meant a dismally limited 
service. Only a few words could be cabled in an 
hour. The croakers were pleased. The men whose 
habit it is to say "I told you so" were joyous. The 
financiers would use their capital for other purposes. 
But Cyrus Field of New York found the money, and 
William Thomson found the way to utilize his own 
law to make success out of what had seemed to 
others to be defeat. He invented the " Siphon 
Recorder." Then the cable was laid under the 
Atlantic, and on August 17, 1858, Thomson's instru- 
ments sent and received this message : 

"Europe and America are united by telegraph. 
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and 
goodwill toward men." 

Two weeks later the cable broke. The world 
jeered and lost faith, according to its habit. Some 



102 LONDON DAYS 

called the cable undertaking "a swindle", some *'a 
hoax ", some a silly toy. These were thoughtful 
critics. Eight years passed, eight years of effort 
to make and submerge a cable that would endure. 
In 1866 the difficulties were overcome. The world 
congratulated itself and the men who had worked 
the "miracle." Lord Kelvin told me the story as if 
it had been a little affair of the day before. "There 
has been so much to think of since then," said he, 
"and there is so much more to be done ! Harnessing 
Niagara is one thing." The men who plan things 
and do them were already planning for that, and as 
in the cable project, they called in Lord Kelvin to 
help. 

"How far can we transmit electricity for power 
and lighting purposes .f^" they asked. 

"Three hundred miles," said he. 

They laid their plans for a much shorter distance, 
within a hundred miles, and they thought that 
Kelvin was dreaming. Years later, when power and 
lighting current had been successfully conveyed 
over much greater distances than Kelvin had sug- 
gested, an acquaintance of mine asked him: "Why 
did n't you tell us that electric power can be con- 
ducted over these greater distances? I thought 
three hundred miles was the limit." 

"The limit is not known," replied Lord Kelvin. 
"In the case you refer to, I answered a specific 
question regarding a specific plan undertaken for 
commercial purposes. The limit was improved by 
time and circumstance, not by Nature. Ten years 
ago we could not build the machinery that is built 



LORD KELVIN lOS 

to-day, nor, on a great scale, employ the conductors 
that are used to-day. My suggestion concerned the 
means then known, not the means that might be 
developed in a decade." 

"Well, I lost a chance," said the would-be investor, 
who was also a Scot. 

"So, I imagine, did the capitalists of Archimedes' 
day. You will remember that they failed to provide 
him with a fulcrum," said Lord Kelvin dryly. 

Lord Kelvin, when a young man, became per- 
manently lame as the result of a skating accident, 
but his lameness did not retard his physical activity. 
Sir William Ramsay, the celebrated chemist who had 
been a pupil of Kelvin, said that it "lent emphasis 
to his amusing class demonstration of 'uniform 
velocity' when he, Kelvin, marched back and forth 
behind his lecture-bench with as even a movement 
as his lameness would permit ; and the class generally 
burst into enthusiastic applause when he altered 
his pace, and introduced them to the meaning of 
the word 'acceleration.' " 

Ramsay's opinion was that Kelvin "was not what 
would be called a good lecturer ; he was too discur- 
sive." Ramsay doubted whether any man "with a 
brain so much above the ordinary, so much more 
rapid in action than the average, can be a first-rate 
teacher. . . . But Kelvin never allowed the interest 
of his students to flag. His aptness in illustration 
and his vigour of language prevented that. Lectur- 
ing one day on * Couples ', he explained how forces 
must be applied to constitute a Couple and illustrated 
the direction of the forces by turning around the 



104 LONDON DAYS 

gas-bracket. This led to a discussion on the miser- 
able quality of Glasgow coal-gas and how it might 
be improved. Following again the main idea, he 
caught hold of the door and swung it to and fro ; 
but again his mind diverged to the difference in the 
structure of English and Scottish doors. We never 
forgot what a ' Couple ' was — but the idea might 
have been conveyed more succinctly." Yes, and ten 
to one the receivers of it would have forgotten what 
a "Couple" was ! 

I heard Kelvin address the Royal Society in Lon- 
don while he was president of that body. He had 
invited me to come, and I was curious enough to 
see the most distinguished scientific body in the 
world learning something from the world's most 
distinguished mathematician, electrician, and nat- 
ural philosopher. The hall in Burlington House 
was filled. Had an earthquake swallowed the hall 
then, the world would have been deprived in- 
stantaneously of dozens of men who were doing its 
thinking for it. The subject of the discourse was 
not thrilling, nor could the lecturer have been ac- 
cused of an attempt to pander to popularity. The 
subject was "The Homogeneous Division of Space." 
There shot through the hour's talk a stream of de- 
scriptive phrases such as " tetrakaidekahedronal 
cells", "parallelepipedal partitionings ", "enantio- 
morphs", and their progeny. 

The genial old gentleman on the platform would 
rest his weight upon his hands on the table, or the 
lecture-desk, and lean forward towards his audience, 
and tell some puzzling facts about nature's puzzles, 



LORD KELVIN 105 

pouring streams of numbers and their multiplica- 
tions and divisions into their ears while they floun- 
dered in the mathematical deluge. He would see 
that he had them puzzled, that his mind was working 
too fast for them ; he must have surmised it from the 
expressions on their faces, for while he announced 
theories, discoveries, and drew conclusions, they, 
with all their knowledge and experience, would look 
as blank or bewildered as schoolboys, and he would 
step back from the table and, with a winning smile, 
remark, "It 's this way", or "After all, it 's simpler 
than it seems", or "I think it would be demon- 
strated so", and turning swiftly on one heel would 
face the blackboard and draw upon it in strokes that 
were like flashes, a diagram which made it all so 
clear that his hearers chuckled, or laughed outright ; 
then swiftly he would turn again and face them with 
that winning smile which seemed to mean, "See 
how simple it is !" Then they would applaud him, 
which is very difiicult for the Royal Society to do. 

Lord Kelvin's was the first house in the world to 
be lighted by electricity throughout. He utilized 
the current in every nook and corner, in attics and 
cellars, in cupboards, closets and wardrobes, long 
before anybody else had attempted to do so. This 
was when everybody else thought electric lighting a 
luxury, but his purpose was to prove it a necessity. 
That was his way. Whenever he acquired new 
knowledge he applied it forthwith to the betterment 
of the human lot. He thought that science for the 
sake of science, or scientists, was as stupid a formula 
as "art for art's sake." Cheese for cheese's sake 



106 LONDON DAYS 

would be quite as useful to mankind. Of what use 
was knowledge if it were not applied to the needs 
of man ? 

He was a yachtsman, but not for sporting pur- 
poses, or faddishness, or luxurious idleness. He 
loved the sea, and his yacht, a schooner named 
Lalla Rookh, enabled him to wrest from the sea some 
of its secrets. For twenty years he went sailing 
every summer, living aboard weeks at a time. He 
held the certificate of a master navigator. It was 
on board the Lalla Rookh that he invented his famous 
apparatus for taking soundings and his no less fa- 
mous compass. These things became necessities for 
navigators. 

The first pair of telephonic instruments that 
Alexander Graham Bell brought to Europe were 
presented by him to Lord Kelvin, who immediately 
put them to use by connecting his house with that 
of his brother-in-law and assistant, Doctor J. T. 
Bottomley. The first electrically lighted house in 
the world was the first in the old world to be con- 
nected by telephone for purposes professional, social, 
personal, and domestic. For how could Kelvin, 
who was always peering into the future, be afraid of 
new things ? He peered into the past, too, for you 
remember how he startled the orthodox mind by 
his calculations regarding the age of the earth. 

Lord Salisbury, just before he became Prime 
Minister for the last time (his long term of 1895- 
1902) was Chancellor of the University of Oxford 
and at the same time President of the British Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Science. At Ox- 



LORD KELVIN 107 

ford, in a memorable year, and in behalf of the 
University of which he was chancellor, he welcomed 
the association of which he was president, and he 
reminded his learned listeners that Lord Kelvin, 
whom he alluded to as "the greatest living master 
of natural science amongst us ", was the first to 
point out that the amount of time required by the 
advocates of the Darwinian theory for the working 
out of the process of evolution which they had imag- 
ined "could not be conceded without assuming the 
existence of a totally different set of natural laws 
from those with which we are acquainted." Hot 
things cool. The once seething earth has cooled 
and is cooling. So many million years ago it must 
have been hotter than now by calculable degrees. 
"But if at any time it was hotter at the surface by 
fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, life would 
then have been impossible on this planet." 

Lord Kelvin assured us that organic life on earth 
cannot have existed more than a hundred million 
years ago. So if you believed in Archbishop Ussher's 
chronology, and niggardly dealt out to the earth 
an age of only six thousand years, or went so far as 
Professor Tait with his ten million, you had, by 
Kelvin's figuring, a tremendous margin to fill up 
somehow. Of course the orthodox jumped and 
squealed. But the geologists and biologists stamped 
and yelled. Some of them wanted more than 
Kelvin's stingy allowance; they wanted not one 
hundred million years, but hundreds of millions. 
And there was a pretty ferment in the camps ! 

Sir Wilham Ramsay I have quoted on Kelvin's 



108 LONDON DAYS 

illustration, in the class room, of the term "accelera- 
tion." Kelvin maintained speed when he had got 
it up. Remember that he was lame, and consider 
his energy. He would dart at an object that stood 
a few feet from him, on his lecture-bench, use it for 
whatever demonstration was required, and then dart 
at another, or at the blackboard, or at the pointer, 
as if he were a busy bee extracting honey from the 
flowers. There was certainty about everything he 
did ; no hesitation, no floundering, no hemming and 
hawing for a word, or the next act. His lameness 
merely lent emphasis to the fact that he was walking ; 
it did not prevent his swiftness of movement. Across 
the grounds of the university I toiled after him like 
** panting time." He gave the impression of readi- 
ness for a race, and might challenge you at any 
minute. His gown was always streaming behind 
him, his mortar-board cap in imminent danger of 
blowing off in the breeze stirred by his advance. 
Well, he had raced the world many years and had 
always won. 

Some great men are so impressed by their own 
greatness that their manner becomes ponderous and 
vast as if they lived in a belief that they cast shadows 
on the sun. Not so Lord Kelvin, who never seemed 
to think that great men thought him a greater than 
themselves. His manner was simple, gentle, cour- 
teous, and direct. He was easy to talk with, and yet 
he had no small talk. But it was not easy to answer 
his questions. There was never such a man as he 
for asking questions unless it were the Chinese Vice- 
roy, Li Hung Chang. Whatever your profession. 



LORD KELVIN 109 

trade, interests in life, he would put questions that 
went to the roots of your matter and revealed on his 
part a greater knowledge of the problems involved 
than you dreamed existed. By tireless questioning 
he learned. But where Li Hung Chang turned the 
results of his questioning to his own benefit, Kelvin 
applied them to the good of the world. Yet when, 
in 1896, they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of 
his professorship at Glasgow he was, I take it, the 
most surprised man in all the galaxy of the famous. 
The dear old gentleman with the domed head, the 
white hair, and generous white beard seemed to be 
asking himself, "What next? Wliy all this fuss 
and feathers ? " But he was apparently genuinely 
pleased, too, for all the tributes bespoke honest 
admiration of achievement and character. Fifty- 
one learned societies, twelve colleges, and twenty- 
eight universities were represented. They were of 
all countries. That day the world, and all that was 
therein, lifted its hat to Lord Kelvin. 

I may slip in here a quotation from Emerson. 
*'In Newton," said Emerson, "science was as easy 
as breathing; he used the same wit to w^eigh the 
moon that he used to buckle his shoes ; and all his 
life was simple, wise, and majestic. So it was in 
Archimedes — always self -same, like the sky. In 
Linnaeus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and equal- 
ity — no stilts, no tiptoe ; and their results are 
wholesome and memorable to all men." 

What Lord Kelvin had done, and was still to do, 
could not be described by any writing of less than 
encyclopaedic scope, and a knowledge as wide and 



110 LONDON DAYS 

deep as his own. Helmholtz may be quoted, as he 
has been quoted by many who attempted the larger 
task from a scientific standpoint. Helmholtz was 
his intimate friend. Helmholtz said: '*He is an 
eminent mathematician, but the gift to translate 
real facts into mathematical equations, and vice 
versa, is, by far, more rare than to find a solution of 
a given mathematical problem, and in this direction 
he is most eminent and original." 

Kelvin's first published paper was a defence of 
the mathematician, Fourier. His second was on 
"The Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous 
Solid Bodies, and Its Connection With The Mathe- 
matical Theory of Electricity." I think he was 
eighteen then. He was certainly showing the bent 
of his mind. Fifty or sixty years later he said, in a 
presidential address to the Royal Society : " Tribu- 
lation, not undisturbed progress, gives life and soul, 
and leads to success where success can be reached." 
I do not know what his tribulations were, but they 
may have been the tribulations of defeat. He may 
have faced many defeats, but he won more successes. 
And the world was more concerned with scientific 
discoveries during his career than it had been in 
the time of Count Rumford and Humphry Davy, 
whose work in disproving that heat is a material 
body had been forgotten because nobody seemed to 
think it more important than curious. Sometime 
in the eighteen-forties James Prescott Joule ascer- 
tained the dynamical equivalent of heat, and settled 
the fact that heat is a mode of motion. Kelvin may 
be said to have leaped to the side of his friend. 



LORD KELVIN 111 

Lord Kelvin was the first to appreciate the impor- 
tance of Joule's discovery, and it was not long before 
he placed the whole subject of thermodynamics on 
a scientific basis. He put his conclusions into these 
easily understandable words: "During any trans- 
formation of energy of one form into energy of an- 
other form, there is always a certain amount of energy 
rendered unavailable for further useful application. 
No known process in nature is exactly reversible : 
that is to say, there is no known process by which 
we can convert a given amount of energy of one 
form into energy of another form, and then, revers- 
ing the process, reconvert the energy of the second 
form thus obtained into the original quantity of 
energy of the first form. In fact, during any trans- 
formation of energy from one form into another, 
there is always a certain portion of energy changed 
into heat in the process of conversion, and the heat 
thus produced becomes dissipated and diffused by 
radiation and conduction. Consequently there is a 
tendency in nature for all the energy in the universe, 
of whatever kind it be, gradually to assume the form 
of heat, and having done so to become equally 
diffused. Now, were all the energy of the universe 
converted into uniformly diffused heat, it would 
cease to be available for producing mechanical 
effort, since, for that purpose, we must have a hot 
source and a cooler condenser. This gradual degra- 
dation of energy is perpetually going on, and, sooner 
or later, unless there be some restorative power of 
which we have, at present, no knowledge whatever, 
the present state of things must come to an end." 



112 LONDON DAYS 

He revealed the Electrodynamics of Qualities of 
Metals ; the size of atoms, the horse-power of the 
sun ; he determined the rigidity of the earth, the 
laws of the tides, made far-reaching discoveries in 
electricity, in vortex motion ; it might be said of 
him that he took the universe for his field. 

But in a chapter like this one is tempted to dw^ell 
too long on high achievements. What attracted 
one more than the achievements was the man, the 
kindly, sympathetic man who loved truth not celeb- 
rity, and work more than its rewards. He was ever 
the same, whether one met him in Glasgow, London, 
at sea, or in America, the same simple, straightfor- 
ward, kindly character. He retained his mental 
activity to the end. He died at eighty-four, and 
seemed only to be departing on another journey in 
quest of truth and friendship. 

On one of the afternoons when I sat with him in 
his study, within the precincts of the university, 
he said, "Patience, great patience is the need of this 
generation. It asks results before it earns them. 
Man is too wasteful of the resources he finds in the 
earth. The most of our coal is lost in smoke; the 
most of our heat is dissipated in the air. We need 
patience not less than courage in dealing with our 
problems." The study was lined with engravings 
and photographs. Darwin and Joule and Faraday 
looked down from the walls, and there were pictures 
of the cable-laying ships, the Hooper, and the Great 
Eastern. There were trophies of travel, — from 
specimens of sea-bottom along the African coast, 
to quite personal mementos of his lectm-es at 



LORD KELVIN 113 

Johns Hopkins University and other places in 
America. 

A typical day of Lord Kelvin's was, in outline, 
this : After breakfast he would, at nine, face his 
class in the university and lecture for an hour. I 
heard him in such an hour lecture on "Kepler's 
Laws." He lectured to his class three days a week. 
After the lecture he would go to White's where he 
was perfecting an electric metre. After White's he 
would return to the university and lecture until 
one o'clock, say, on the "Higher Mathematics." 
Then home to lunch. After lunch consulting work 
on the lighting of a town by electricity. After that 
an hour in Lady Kelvin's drawing-room, taking tea 
with friends. Then work in the study over the laws 
governing the formation of crystals. Then dinner. 
Then calculations in the study, or writing a paper 
for one of the numerous societies of which he was a 
working member. In the intervals, with his secre- 
tary's aid, he would attend to his correspondence. 
And, if waiting for his secretary, out of a coat pocket 
would come the little green book, and into it would 
go notes, calculations, or diagrams, perhaps all three. 
That little green book would come out whenever he 
had a minute to spare, in his dressing-room, or on 
the stairs, or in a train, or a cab, wherever he hap- 
pened to be, and the thought flashed. I often 
wondered what his thoughts were on the conserva- 
tion of personal energy. 



CHAPTER IX 

TENNYSON 

Freshwater is an overgrown village which sprawls 
about the western end of the lovely Isle of Wight. 
The meanness of much of its masonry is compensated 
by its remarkably wholesome air. Man has done his 
best to spoil Freshwater, but he has not wholly suc- 
ceeded — yet. Give him time, and more radicalism, 
and he will make it one of the ugly spots of earth. I 
made its acquaintance in the early spring of 1882, 
and subsequently have visited it many times. 

When I first made acquaintance with Freshwater, 
there was no railway within eleven miles, Newport 
being the terminus of the island lines which were 
as drolly inconvenient as they are now. The 
fiddling, amateurish railway, which has come in since 
then, has not only robbed Freshwater of its seclusion 
but has saddled parts of the rolling country with 
shabby streets of mean houses worthy of a Montana 
mining town. Towards the downs and the sea much 
of the old charm remains. About Farringford it is 
undisturbed. And it was at Farringford, that lovely 
estate, that Tennyson lived. 

I had quarters in a house that faced the sea. 
And these quarters were mine whenever, in the 



TENNYSON 115 

thirty-six years since that delightful May, I returned 
to Freshwater. They are mine no longer. The 
house has become an hotel. Now, in the thirty- 
eighth year of my Freshwatering, I have lodgment 
elsewhere. The house that sheltered me so long is 
scarcely a quarter of a mile from Tennyson's Lane, 
and many of the poet's friends have stayed in it, and 
friends of Watts, for that great artist also lived in 
Freshwater, first at a house which is now called 
Dimbola, and subsequently at " The Briary", a charm- 
ing home built by the Prinseps and facing Tennyson's 
*' noble Down." In the rooms to which I have so often 
retreated, and where I so often watched the blue 
Channel dancing in the sunshine, there are, or were, 
many mementos of past days. Some of them were 
photographs, and, as any one who knows the Fresh- 
water legends may guess, they were taken by Mrs. 
Cameron, the first of the artist photographers, and, 
in her day, the celebrator of all the celebrated who 
came to Freshwater to visit the poet. 

Mrs. Cameron lived at Dimbola which is at 
the southeastern corner of the Farringford estate. 
"She were a concentric lady who wore velvet gowns 
a-trailin' in the dusty roads," as one old-timer 
described her to me. Her photography was not 
professional but amateur, and her skill in it was 
quite remarkable. So was her persistence. She 
would not permit a possible "subject" to escape 
without "taking" him or her. She was quite inti- 
mate with the Tennysons, and always called the 
poet by his Christian name. One day, while there 
was a smallpox scare about, she rushed to Farring- 



116 LONDON DAYS 

ford, with a stranger in tow, and finding Tennyson 
within, she opened the door of the room where he 
was sitting, and bidding the stranger follow, cried, 
"Alfred, I 've brought a doctor to vaccinate you. 
You must be vaccinated !" 

Tennyson, horrified, fled to an adjoining room 
and bolted the door after him. 

"Alfred, Alfred," Mrs. Cameron called, "I've 
brought a doctor. You must be vaccinated; you 
really must ! '* 

There was no reply. 

"Oh, Alfred, you 're a coward! Come and be 
vaccinated ! " 

She won. 

When Garibaldi visited Tennyson, he planted a 
tree in the Farringford grounds. And Mrs. Cameron 
planted herself before him, and begged him to come 
and be photographed. Rather eccentric, as my old- 
timer had tried to convey, she had that morning 
hastened to Farringford without hat, or gloves, and 
with her sleeves rolled. up, just as she came from 
her "dark room", and her hands were stained with 
photographic chemicals. Garibaldi seems to have 
taken her for a beggar and was turning away, when 
she knelt before him and implored him to let her 
photograph him. 

Again she won. She always won in such contests. 

Mrs. Cameron's day was before the days of dry 
plates and films. The accumulation of negatives 
that she left when, with her husband, she returned 
to Ceylon, where they had formerly lived for many 
years, passed into the possession of a son. I do not 



TENNYSON 117 

know what has been their subsequent fate; but if 
uninjured they would be very interesting now, and 
a collection of prints from them would have a value 
all its own. She made a number, I daresay many 
photographs of Tennyson and the members of his 
family; and when Longfellow came to Farringford, 
the good lady triumphantly proclaimed him a 
captive. 

She was a kind-hearted, good-natured soul, but 
when she wanted to carry a point she could be as 
imperious and decisive as any one that ever lived in 
the Isle. The neighbourhood children she would 
persuade by "sweeties", or, failing these, by main 
force, to "come and be photographed" in this char- 
acter or that, and there were maid servants with 
classic faces and ploughmen with fine heads who 
posed for her as characters in plays and poems, 
in costumes which she would improvise. Mrs. 
Cameron was a generous, interesting, impulsive 
woman. Much of Freshwater legend gathers about 
her, and her camera, and her diligence in amateur 
theatricals. 

In my island study there hung for many years the 
two best photographs of Tennyson that I ever saw. 
They were taken by Mrs. Cameron. The first was, 
I believe, taken about 1870, or '72. It represents the 
poet seated, and holding with both hands a book 
half opened in his lap. He wears a black morning 
coat, closely buttoned, cut in the fashion of the time. 
Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in 
his portraits, here is the stiff "dickey" of Piccadilly ; 
the cuffs, too, are in the mode, and over the coat a 



118 LONDON DAYS 

monocle hangs. It is quite out of the style of other 
Tennyson portraits with which I am reasonably 
familiar, but on that account it has a special interest 
of its own. The second photograph, to which I 
have alluded, is not only thoroughly characteristic 
but has achieved some fame as "The Dirty Monk", 
and is thus autographed by its original : 

"7 prefer ' The Dirty Monk' 
to the others of me. 

A. Tennyson. 
Except one by May all." 

When I returned to Freshwater for three or four 
months in 1913, after several years' absence, I 
looked, as usual, for this precious pair. But they 
had gone, and no one could tell, or would tell, when 
or where. Some souvenir hunter must have loved 
them too well. 

There are, or were, some Morland prints, too. 
George Morland lived and painted in Freshwater, in 
a bit cottage that stood in front of the site of this 
house, but which disappeared nearly a century ago. 
Mrs. Cameron, could she revisit the glimpses of the 
moon, would find her quiet old village developed 
into a sprawling, country town. It had five hundred 
inhabitants when Tennyson first came to it in a 
sailboat from the mainland, in 1852, or 1853 ; it has 
between five and ten thousand now, west of the Yar. 
The number shifts with the summer visitors, and 
the military cannot be counted, for they come and 
go in a variable stream. Ever since the war began, 
the fit and the wounded, the trained and the un- 



TENNYSON 119 

trained have passed through in large numbers, or 
have stayed for longer or shorter terms. A war 
town has grown up on a border of the old town. 
Golden Hill is now an expanse of barrack huts and 
not of yellow gorse. 

Mrs. Cameron believed in getting things done, 
not in talking about them. She transformed the 
coal shed at Dimbola into a dark room for developing 
her negatives ; and the poultry house became a 
studio. When her husband, a recluse who had n't 
so much as seen the beach for a dozen years, wanted 
a lawn, she had turf dug by night and laid in the 
garden. Calling her husband to the window next 
morning, she pointed to the expanse of new-laid 
turf and said, "There 's your lawn !" as if any one 
would deny her power to work miracles. 

Farringford, of course, is enclosed by hedges and 
trees, literally surrounded by them. The house 
itself is still further protected from the gaze of the 
outer world by an inner circle of trees and shrubbery. 
The estate is bisected by the lovely lane which has 
been described in every account ever written of 
Tennyson, and photographed a thousand times. It, 
in turn, has a hedgerow on each side and is over- 
arched by elms. It is really an approach to the 
farm which is attached to the home acres, and 
through it, for walking purposes, the public has a 
right-of-way. At the crest of the rising ground is a 
little green door, set in the high-banked hedge which 
guards the home lawns, and by this green door the 
poet would pass to the down along another lane which 
runs at right angles to the one associated with his 



120 LONDON DAYS 

name and immediately opposite the green door. A 
few feet beyond this, a rustic bridge overhead 
spans Tennyson's Lane, and by this bridge the poet 
could cross into a woodland without having to enter 
the Lane, where his privacy might be disturbed, and 
so walk to Maiden's Croft, where a little green 
summerhouse stands under the trees and where he 
often wrote and meditated. From this summer- 
house he had the best view of the beautiful and 
noble down. From the windows of Farringford 
there are exquisite views of seascape and landscape, 
with lush fields in the foreground, — a view, on sunny 
days, of quite un-English colour. In the distance 
St. Catherine's Point and above it the white 
crown of the Landslip, and above that the dark 
shape of St. Boniface Down, lifting its head eight 
hundred feet toward the clouds ; in the middle 
distance a tumble of green hills, and to the right 
the sea dappled with shafts of light and colour 
ever changing, — mauves and blues and greens, 
splashed with browns and reds, shifting and playing 
there under the sun. It might be Italian sea and 
Italian landscape. And Tennyson called it his "bit 
of Italy." You can see it just as he saw it, if you 
pause at an iron gate on your left, near the top of 
the rise in the Lane, and you will have in the fore- 
ground a group of Italian-like trees beyond which 
Stag Rock and Arched Rock stand with their feet 
in the tiny bay. It is of all bits of English land and 
water one of the most memorable for form and 
colour, — this little Italy. And it drew Tennyson 
to Farringford and held him there. 



TENNYSON 121 

Tennyson was not seen much in the village, but 
he often walked to the bay. Here is my first glimpse 
of him : a tall man looking like a cloaked brigand ; 
his head was swallowed by a great hat, soft and black, 
and he was pointing with a stick. 

"Making yourself at home here, aren't you.''" 
he was understood to say in something between a 
rumble and growl. 

An artist friend of mine was seated on a sketching 
stool at the iron gate, making a study of the "bit of 
Italy." Before the stool was an easel, a palette, 
and a box of water colours. Tennyson, who was 
near-sighted, saw at first only the seated figure on 
the camp stool, leaning back against the open gate 
and gazing at the unique view. 

"Very much at home," continued the poet. 

The right-of-way was for walking only, not for 
sitting in chairs and encumbering the earth with 
easels and general impedimenta of the fine arts. My 
friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably 
not thought of this, and, having a sudden conscious- 
ness of intrusion, whispered to me, around the hedge : 

"Tennyson! OLord!" 

The great man drew nearer, and then, taking in 
the situation, said : 

"Ah, painting! Brothers in art. Good morn- 
ing!" 

This was perhaps tender treatment as compared 
with what we had heard a pair of strangers might 
have expected. But my friend, although flurried 
because Jove had passed, remained at work. I for- 
get, though, whether the sketch was ever completed. 



122 LONDON DAYS 

I was curious enough, however, to pass on, by a 
detour, in the hope of seeing Jove on his homeward 
stroll. But he had vanished, and there were no 
thunderings, near or far. 

Mrs. Cameron and her household, after years at 
enlivening and photographing Freshwater, returned 
to Ceylon. The departure was an occasion for a 
liberal distribution of photographs among the in- 
habitants of the West Wight ; and where there was 
a souvenir to be given or a tip to be left, mounted 
portraits of celebrities, or of models dressed as char- 
acters in fiction or poetry, were handed out. Thus 
it happened that many of the pleasant lodging-houses 
in the vicinity became galleries of Cameron art. 

"Ideal" Ward had built a country mansion 
within a mile of Farringford. It was called Weston 
Manor. The eminent Catholic scholar and writer 
was, of course, a friend of Tennyson. And the two 
would dispute, of course, about religion, or, rather, 
about theology, without the slightest effect upon 
each other's opinions. The house is still in the pos- 
session of the Ward family, but is not occupied 
by them. For some years the private chaplain at 
Weston Manor was Father Peter Haythornthwaite, a 
most agreeable and hard-working man. Father 
Peter, as they called him in the island, was also a 
friend of Tennyson and frequently a companion of 
his walks. He told me an amusing story connected 
with his first dinner at Farringford. Tennyson had 
an Irish maid, Mary by name. The family were 
very fond of her ; her devotion to them was equalled 
only by her zeal in serving them, which she would 



TENNYSON 12S 

sometimes do in a domineering, if loyal manner, 
to which the poet bowed submissively. Tennyson 
disliked formality and stiffness, and was uncomfort- 
able in a dress suit and starched shirt. Dressing for 
dinner he avoided whenever he could. Mary had 
laid out his most ceremonious clothes. 

"Put them away," said he. "I '11 not wear 
them!" 

Mary insisted. 

"Now, I see," said Tennyson. "I am to wear 
them for that priest, eh?" 

"Plaze, sir!" 

"Will he come in his altar robes and stole?" 

"The saints forbid!" said she. 

"If they forbid him, why should they compel me?" 
he asked. 

"It 's I, yer Honour, that tell ye, for the sake of 
the house ! And he 's a man of God." 

"I could n't resist that, could I?" the poet asked 
of Father Peter. "And so," said he, " I dressed." 

At the table one evening, Tennyson, being in a 
humorous mood, composed rhyming epitaphs upon 
every name that occurred to him. 

" What would you say of me ? " asked Father Peter. 

Instantly this couplet rolled from the lips of the 
host: 

"Here lies P. Hay thorn thwaite. 
Human by nature, Roman by fate." 

A letter of Mrs. Cameron's came under my ob- 
servation one day, and I was permitted to make a 
note from it. "Tennyson," she wrote, "was very 
violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for 



lU LONDON DAYS 

autographs. He said he beHeved every crime and 
every vice in the world was connected with the 
passion for autographs and anecdotes and records ; 
that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance 
with the Hves of great men was treating them like 
pigs to be ripped open for the public; and that he 
knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; 
that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart 
and soul that he knew nothing, and would know 
nothing, of Jane Austen; and that there were no 
letters preserved, either of Shakespeare's, or of Jane 
Austen's; and that they had not been ripped open 
like pigs. Then he said that the post for two days 
had brought him no letters, and that he thought 
there was a sort of syncope in the world as to him 
and his fame." 

That last touch is delicious. Tennyson did not 
like to be ignored. He was proud, and justly proud, 
of his fame. Sir Edwin Arnold said: "Tennyson 
had a noble vanity, a proud pleasure in the very 
notoriety which brought strangers peeping and 
stealing about his gates." Perhaps so, but it was a 
case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be 
to him through whom the offence cometh." He 
hated to have tributes thrust upon him ; he hated 
intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too 
much from that sort of thmg at Farringford when 
summer visitors overran Freshwater. He liked to 
be recognised along the country roads; he liked to 
have people lift their hats to him ; he liked to know 
that his work meant something to the passer by. 
But he shunned the merely curious stranger. 



TENNYSON 125 

And so it was natural enough that he should have 
built a summer home on the mainland, Aldworth, 
where there was no summer resort and no plague of 
the curious. His friend, James Knowles, of the 
Nineteenth Century, designed the house, and there 
Tennyson passed many happy summers and autumns. 
And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of 1892, 
he died. Whether he loved Farringford more, or 
Aldworth more, I do not know. But probably he 
was as much attached to one as to the other, for 
each had its special associations. 

The Tennysonian cloak, the Tennysonian hat, the 
rolling collar, and the touzled beard and hair were 
not unique. There lived at one time in Freshwater 
a brother of the poet. He resembled the poet and 
dressed like him. At the same time there was 
another resident of the place who not only resembled 
Lord Tennyson but "got himself up" in close imita- 
tion of his dress and manner. He was a warm 
admirer of Tennyson, and was immensely flattered 
to be mistaken for him by strangers. Small boys of 
the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny 
tips from this adoring person by pretending to mis- 
take him for their celebrated townsman. On the 
whole it was rather a good thing to have three figures 
in the place, any one of which might be looked upon 
or followed by the summer visitor as the famous poet. 
It might be puzzling if the stranger met two or three 
Tennysons in a mile, but two of them could easily 
divert attention from the third, who was skilled in 
avoiding strangers. 

There was an aged man who had been a gardener 



126 LONDON DAYS 

at Farringford and was living on a little pension 
from that quarter. One morning he heard that the 
Poet Laureate had died. Meeting Father Peter in 
the road he expressed his grief that "his pore ludship 
have passed away." Then, with much concern for 
the succession, he asked : 

"D'ye think likely Mr. Hallam will follow his 
father's business ? " 

Father Peter thought it quite unlikely. 

"Ah," said the pensioner, much relieved. " I think 
nowt on 't, nowt !" 

I have seen Farringford described as " a beautifully 
wooded gentleman's park." It must, at least, be 
acknowledged that if the gentleman were not 
beautifully wooded, he lived there, and that he lived 
a beautiful and serene life, a noble life, adding 
greatly to the fame of England, and no less to the 
human lot. Forty of his eighty-three years were 
Farringford years. Never was poet more happily 
placed than in this earthly paradise. Every cir- 
cumstance of loyalty and love, of understanding 
and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aid worth. 
And never had genius a more devoted aid than 
Tennyson had in his son Hallam, the present Lord 
Tennyson, shield and buckler to his father and to 
his gentle mother, the dear lady who seemed like a 
spirit held on earth only by the devotion of husband 
and son. A family life richer and more tender one 
does not know among all the lives that one has seen, 
or ever heard of. To write more about it now would 
be impious. 

Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in West- 



TENNYSON 127 

minster Abbey, on an October day in 1892, a com- 
mittee of his neighbours in Freshwater was formed 
for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the 
rural region where half his life had been passed. 
The memorial was meant to be a local and neigh- 
bourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally 
enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a 
monument, tablet, or window, in the village church. 
But a more fitting idea was adopted. 

There stood on the summit of the High Down, 
"Tennyson's Down" as it is more generally known, 
a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber sur- 
mounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long 
ago, fire had blazed when alarms were signalled 
from hill to hill along the coast. This beacon had 
been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had 
served through decades as a mark for navigation 
for the endless processions of ships passing up and 
down the English Channel and through the Solent 
by the Needles. Six or seven hundred feet above 
the sea, and near the edge of a long white cliff, it 
was easily seen by navigators bound inward or out- 
ward. For forty years Tennyson had made it a 
point of call in his almost daily walks. The com- 
mittee believed that in the place of the old wooden 
structure a granite shaft could be erected, serving 
at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to 
seamen. 

The Reverend Doctor Merriman, Rector of Fresh- 
water, Colonel Crozier, Doctor Hollis, and others, 
invited me to join the committee, and I did so, sug- 
gesting that Americans would wish to share in erect- 



128 LONDON DAYS 

ing the proposed memorial, but that it would be 
scarcely possible for them to participate were the 
object undertaken purely as a village or neighbour- 
hood tribute. The broader suggestion was adopted. 
A Celtic cross in Cornish granite was designed by Mr. 
J. L. Pearson, of the Royal Academy, and the 
Brethren of Trinity House (the Lighthouse Board) 
consented to preserve it in perpetuity if the commit- 
tee would provide for its erection. I communicated 
with my old friend, Mrs. James T. Fields of Boston, 
the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and 
she brought together an American committee for 
the purpose of cooperating with the one in Fresh- 
water. Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her 
first associate and the first American subscriber. 
The daughters of Longfellow and Lowell were mem- 
bers of the American committee, and so were Mrs. 
Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret 
Deland, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Professor Charles 
Eliot Norton, Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mr. 
H. O. Houghton, Mr. George H. Mifflin, and others. 
Several American newspapers courteously drew at- 
tention to the proposed memorial, and Mr. George 
W. Smalley made an appeal through the New York 
Tribune, as I did through other papers. Subscrip- 
tions were purposely confined to small amounts so 
that the humblest lover of Tennyson could contrib- 
ute his mite. I remember that among the first to 
come were twenty-five cents "from a bricklayer", 
and "a dollar from a proof reader." 

The cross was erected and now, a quarter of a 
century later, it shows scarcely a sign of weather. 



TENNYSON 129 

though it fronts the sun, and the storms beat upon 
it, seven hundred feet above the sea. It bears this 
inscription : 

IN MEMORY 

OF ALFRED 

LORD TENNYSON 

THIS CROSS IS 

RAISED A BEACON 

TO SAILORS BY 

THE PEOPLE OF 

FRESHWATER AND 

OTHER FRIENDS 

IN ENGLAND 

AND AMERICA 

Cliff-erosion causes the precipitous brink to creep 
slowly toward the cross. By or before the middle 
of the present century it may become necessary to 
remove the Beacon Cross some yards to the north. 

It was, I think, on the day of Tennyson's burial 
that the following letter appeared in the Times, over 
the signature P. L. I. 

"Perhaps the following anecdotes may be of in- 
terest, related as they were in a paper read privately 
by the late James T. Fields, in 1872, during my stay 
in Boston. 

"Mr. Fields said that while staying with the poet 
at Farringford, Tennyson said at midnight, 'Fields, 
let 's take a walk ! ' It was a dark and wild night, 
the sea breaking at the foot of the cliffs. Knowing 
the dangers of the place and his near-sightedness, 
I feared for his safety ; however, he trudged on 
through the thick grass with his stick, I also using 
the one he had lent me on setting out. 



130 LONDON DAYS 

"Presently he dropped on hands and knees in 
the grass. Alarmed I asked, ' What is the matter ? ' 
He answered in a strong, Lincolnshire accent, 
'Violets, man, violets! Get thee down and have a 
smell ; it will make thee sleep the better ! ' He had 
detected them by his acute sense of smell, aided by 
his strong love of nature. I dropped down, and the 
sense of the ridiculous struck me forcibly, — in such 
a position at midnight lying in the thick grass. He 
joined in my laughter, and we started for home. 

"He was egotistical to an extreme, but it was 
superb, and deeply impressed one. An old lady once, 
sitting next to Tennyson while some of his poems 
were being read, exclaimed, ' Oh ! how exquisite ! ' 
*I should say it was,' replied the poet. At another 
time he said no one could read 'Maud' but himself. 
'Fields, come and see me, and I will give you " Maud " 
so that you will never forget it.' This was perfectly 
true. I felt I could have listened to him forever, 
and would go any distance to hear it as he gave it." 

There was much more to the same purpose. But 
Mr. Fields, like several others who have written 
about Tennyson, may have over-emphasised the 
poet's "egotism." Tennyson was an absolutely 
honest man. He said what he thought. If another 
said that his work was "exquisite" or "superb", 
or this, or that, he would not affect a self-deprecia- 
tion which he did not feel. That would have been 
dishonest. If the work were fine, he knew it and 
said so. If it were over-praised, he said that too. 
He was not imposed upon by flattery, and he hated 
that and detected it easily enough. The "violet" 
incident above has been quoted frequently. It is 
quoted here because Mr. Fields was mistaken about 



TENNYSON 131 

"the thick grass." That does not grow on the 
down. Besides the furze bushes, there is only 
close-cropped turf. If he walked through "thick 
grass" it may have been on the way to and from 
the down, perhaps, by the way of Maiden's Croft. 
And on the down the poet would have been in no 
peril through his short-sightedness. He was a 
countryman, and knew every inch of the way. A 
countryman can tell by the slope of the ground, by 
"the lie of the land" under his feet, whether or not 
the down is leading him astray. If he is sure- 
footed, far sight will not help him much in the dark. 
But Fields, although a kindly soul, was a publisher, 
and he might easily have felt "ridiculous" when 
kneeling at the feet of a poet. 

A diligent antiquary lived at Freshwater in Tenny- 
son's time. He lived in Easton Cottage, nearly 
opposite the road-end of Tennyson's Lane. His 
name was Robert Walker, and he was well advanced 
in age. When I knew him, in the nineties, he was 
very deaf, so that talking with him was tiresome. 
But he had interesting talk to give, even if he re- 
ceived none in return. He had been a dealer in 
antiques, I forget where, but I remember that he 
told me he had made and lost two fortunes, and 
was sheltering his last years under the shreds of the 
second. He told me, too, that he had been offered 
the curatorship of a well-known museum, but had 
declined, preferring retirement in Freshwater. I 
have a vague recollection of being shown the cor- 
respondence. But, at any rate, the old man promised 
to confer new fame on Freshwater by proving that it 



132 LONDON DAYS 

had very ancient fame, indeed, as a harbourage and 
stage in the overland route to the tin mines of 
Cornwall in the time of the Phoenicians ! 

His argument was something like this : In the 
obscure past there were Phoenicians. So much we 
grant. They conducted with the world at large, 
or with as much of it as was then known, a trade in 
tin. Strabo tells us so. Whence came their tin? 
From Cornwall. And how did they get to Cornwall ? 
By the Isle of Wight, which seems a roundabout way, 
but was not so. The "ships" of the Phoenicians 
"were little more than open boats, partly decked, 
and liable to be swamped by the dash of the waves 
over their sides and prows. They were propelled 
by rowers, numbering from thirty to fifty; if wind 
served they stepped a single mast and hoisted a 
single sail." They avoided the heavy seas of the 
Bay of Biscay, and came by the rivers of France. 
Up from the Mediterranean they would proceed by 
the Rhone to where Lyons is now. There they 
would leave their vessels. From there overland to 
the Seine, where they had another fleet awaiting 
them. Then down the Seine to where Havre, or 
Barfleur, or Cherbourg stand now, and thence 
across the Channel to the Isle of Wight, the nearest 
front of barbarian England. 

Freshwater was then an island. It is almost an 
island now. The little tidal river, Yar, rises within 
a few yards of the Channel and flows north, to the 
Solent. In those days there was probably no beach 
at Freshwater Bay ; the present beach was formed 
after modern man had constructed a causeway 



TENNYSON 133 

there. In those days the waters of the Channel 
flowed into the Yar, making a shallow estuary suffi- 
cient for an anchorage, where the Phoenician craft 
could lie while their adventurous crews were follow- 
ing the Cornish trail, a feat easily performed, because, 
in those days, the Isle of Wight was doubtless joined 
to the mainland at Hurst Castle. If it were not it 
should have been, in order to add interest to the 
story. 

About the beginning of the eighteen-nineties 
workmen were widening and lowering the road which 
skirts Farringford and the Briary, and gives an 
entrance to the rear of Weston Manor. They dug 
so closely into a Weston hedge that, in going below 
the subsoil of it, they discovered the remains of 
ancient structures containing pottery, ash, charcoal, 
lime, enamelled bricks, and so on. Walker declared 
the remains were Phoenician, and the site that of a 
crematorium and a pottery. He cited evidence 
which I have not space to record. Being an anti- 
quary he turned on other antiquaries. He wrote a 
pamphlet. The Antiquary magazine took up the 
case and cited similar discoveries, undoubtedly 
Phoenician, in South Devon. Warm arguments 
for and against the Phoenician theory were thrown 
back and forth. And Freshwater laughed. It was 
sure, and is sure still, that the anti-Phoenicians had 
the best of it, and Neighbour Walker the worst of 
it. A neighbour would have the worst of it, of 
course. But Walker persuaded the Ward of the 
time (Granville) to preserve the discoveries and to 
erect above them two protecting domes of concrete. 



134 LONDON DAYS 

Walker, I think, had the best of it, for if he could 
not prove the remains to have been Phoenician, his 
adversaries could not prove them to have been 
anything else. The antiquary is dead, and the local 
cabmen point, with the scorn of their calling, to 
*' Walker's Pups" in the hedgerow as you drive to 
Totland or Alum Bay. 

Local prophets, here as elsewhere, may prophesy 
without excess of honour. Tennyson himself used 
to tell an anecdote which had the run of the village : 

"There 's Farringford," said a cabman to a visit- 
ing "fare." 

"Ah!" responded the latter, "a great man lives 
there." 

"D' ye call him great?" retorted cabby. "He 
only keeps one man, and he don't sleep in the 
house !" 

Just as I reach this point in this chapter, there 
comes to me, in Hampshire, the news of Lady 
Ritchie's death. This means the breaking of 
almost the last link of that old Island circle. And 
it means the vanishing from life of one of the sweetest 
and dearest old ladies I have ever known. She was 
Thackeray's eldest daughter. 

When my wife and I left the Island, late in 1918, 
Lady Ritchie was one of the last friends we saw. 
She came to our gate to say good-bye. She was 
then over eighty-one. How many of my friends 
are more than eighty ! The most active youth is 
ninety-three ! He also is an Isle of Wighter. Lady 
Ritchie was an Isle of Wighter half of every year. 
She had first visited Freshwater with her father 



TENNYSON 135 

when she was a child, and her association with it 
had never ceased since then. For many years past 
she had a Httle house there. "The Porch" it was 
called. The colder half of the year she lived in 
London, in St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea; the 
warmer half at "The Porch." In 1918, when Chel- 
sea Hospital, the home of the red-coated Old Pen- 
sioners, was bombed by German aircraft, she had 
a narrow escape. Her house faces the hospital 
grounds, and every window pane in the front was 
shattered. She was sitting in her drawing-room at 
the time, but was unhurt by the flying glass and 
unruffled by the flashing and crashing all about 
her. She was then approaching her eighty-first 
birthday. But ladies of eighty-one, however un- 
conquerable, do not go through such an experience 
without nerve strain. When I saw her again, a 
few weeks later, she, for the first time, seemed con- 
scious that age was advancing upon her. The 
pleasant little gatherings became fewer; she was 
much fatigued after them. But her spirits were as 
high as ever, and her thought as kindly. 

When the United States entered the war, she came 
to me with a jubilant letter from an old friend of 
hers in New York. Her friend had written, "I 
rejoice that you and I are now fighting together, 
side by side." 

"Yes, yes," said Lady Ritchie, reading the letter 
to me, "think of it ! Two old ladies of eighty fight- 
ing shoulder to shoulder!" And straightway she 
made a little American flag which she hung at "The 
Porch" door, alongside a Union Jack. 



136 LONDON DAYS 

She was, I think, the last of that once considerable 
group whose members always addressed, and al- 
luded to, the first Lord Tennyson as "Alfred." 
And she was as full of stories of him as an egg is of 
meat. The last time we passed Farringford to- 
gether, she said : 

"I like to think of the expression on Alfred's 
face when he was told that a new boy-in-buttons, a 
country lad whom he had just taken into service, 
answered the doorbell one day, and saw a tall, 
sedate gentleman standing there. 

"'Tell your master that the Prince Consort has 
called,' he said to the boy. 

"'Oh, crickey!' exclaimed the youngster, who 
fled to the innermost parts of the house. 

"Somehow, I forget how, the message was con- 
veyed to Alfred, who found the Prince waiting at 
the door, still laughing at the boy's consternation. 
The Island life was fairly simple in those days." 

And what is left of that old life is gracious, kindly, 
hospitable. In no place in any part of the earth 
have I met with greater kindliness than in Fresh- 
water. That is why I am fond of the West Wight 
and have been there so often. I wonder if ever I 
shall go there again. Once I crossed the Atlantic to 
go there and only there. And now, to-day that 
gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to 
return. How kindly she was, and gentle ! What 
sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner that 
was not put on and off like a gown. It was innate. 
There are few left in the world like that dear lady. 
The present generation calls them old-fashioned. 



TENNYSON 137 

Theirs was indeed an old fashion, and the world is 
poorer because it does not know how to match it. 
Their spirit was not the spirit of the age as we see 
it at the dawn of the third decade of the Twentieth 
Century. Farewell, dear lady, you were Thackeray's 
finest work ! 



CHAPTER X 

GLADSTONE 

The enthusiasms and antagonisms set alight by 
Mr. Gladstone in his long career flame now, a gen- 
eration after his death, quite as fiercely as they did 
before the Great War. Not that he was a warlike 
man, except upon the hustings and in the House. 
You would think that everybody could see now that 
Gladstone was right about the Turks. But Wood- 
row Wilson and the ex-Kaiser have not seen so 
much. They were on the side of the Turks and 
Bulgarians. Wilson was so much on their side that 
he would not fight them, and by his abstention con- 
tributed to the situation which made the Armenian 
massacres a continuous entertainment for Berlin, 
and isolated Russia from her Allies. And there is 
Ireland, of course, Ireland with De Valera instead 
of with Parnell. And there is Egypt. And there is 
India. All of these synonymes for trouble, and 
debates in the House. All these troubles to be 
healed by talk. But there is no one now who talks 
so well as Mr. Gladstone. 

When Gladstone died, men did not agree about 
what he had done in his more than sixty years of 
public life, — done, that is, for the United Kingdom 



GLADSTONE 139 

and the Empire. They do not agree now. What 
was the outstanding achievement of his life, the 
thing, above all, by which posterity will remember 
him ? Was it his devotion to the freedom of human 
kind ? Perhaps. But the main question is so diffi- 
cult to answer that I shall not attempt the task, not 
merely because it is difficult, but mainly because it is 
not my intention to tread the mazes of British politics. 

The Nineteenth Century, the despised Victorian 
Age, if you please, was an age of great men. Sonie 
of them seem smaller now than they did before July, 
1914. Bismarck, for example. Bismarck was a 
liar. Gladstone was not. And yet he had a theo- 
logical mind. Gladstone's stature has not dimin- 
ished with the shrinking process of time. But will 
it diminish ? Who can tell ? The world salutes his 
integrity. Does it salute for integrity and courage 
any political personage of to-day ? 

The world was taught, generation after generation, 
that the emergency produces the man. The year 
1914 and its six successors brought emergency to 
every country, such emergency as no country had 
ever known before. But the emergencies did not 
produce the political men. Only France produced 
the political man. Without him, German intrigue 
would have overrun the world, even after the Ger- 
mans fled from France and Belgium and the East. 
We would have been smothered by words and 
machinations, as northern France and Belgium had 
been smothered by the Teutonic cloud-bursts. But 
there was Clemenceau, — Clemenceau who had ap- 
pointed Foch. 



140 LONDON DAYS 

These two men and the AUied commanders brought 
victory to civiHsation. If the poHticians do not 
destroy the work and plans, the "peace" they are 
making now will endure for a while. If the poli- 
ticians, toying with their new doll, the League of 
Nations, keep their heads in the clouds, I believe 
they will come crashing to earth within ten years, 
frightened and amazed by a greater and longer war 
than has yet been known. They sowed its seeds in 
the Armistice and at Versailles. And later when, 
month after month, they changed their plans from 
day to day. 

It is sometimes unwise to avoid digressions. No 
apology is made, or considered necessary, for this 
one. 

I was speaking of Mr. Gladstone. It was my priv- 
ilege to see him and hear him frequently during 
twenty years. Perhaps it was due to some defect 
of nature that I was never much influenced politi- 
cally by him. His eloquence was anything you may 
choose to imagine it, and you would have admired 
it, if you could dissociate from it the involved 
phrases, the delicate adjustments, the hair-split 
meanings which might balance any interpretation 
that might be put upon them, the contradictions, 
the finely-spun arguments which, woven into the 
texture of his speeches, would enmesh the unwary, — 
you would have admired it hugely if you could have 
dissociated these things from it. His majorities 
probably did not make the effort. He had the magic 
of making them forget. 

He could be, and was, eloquent on any subject, 



GLADSTONE 141 

and, for that reason, he could and did unsettle many 
minds on many themes. He was a word-spinner of 
extraordinary skill and charm, and he made multi- 
tudes think they had opinions of their own when 
their opinions were what he had taught them. That 
is one of the gifts of leadership. And it was a 
special privilege of Mr. Gladstone's leadership of 
democracy that he remained an aristocrat by habit 
and inclination. Morley's "Life" of him contains 
this passage from a privately printed account of 
Ruskin at Hawarden : 

"Something like a little amicable duel took place 
at one time between Ruskin and Mr. G. when 
Ruskin directly attacked his host as a 'leveller,' 
'You see you think one man is as good as another, 
and all men equally competent to judge aright on 
political questions ; whereas I am a believer in an 
aristocracy.' And straight came the answer from 
Mr. Gladstone, ' Oh dear, no ! I am nothing of the 
sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic prin- 
ciple — the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out 
ineqiialitarian' a confession which Ruskin treated 
with intense delight, clapping his hands trium- 
phantly." 

Eloquence has not been rated modestly among the 
arts during some thousands of years. Whether it 
has done more for the advancement or the retarda- 
tion of man may be a subject for dispute. That it 
has done both is unquestioned by those who talk less 
than they think. It is a useful accomplishment 
when the object is to get a body of men to think and 
act in unison ; it is equally useful in promoting dis- 
union. It is therefore of most service to politicians 



142 LONDON DAYS 

and preachers, the aim of these gentlemen being to 
promote unity for their own causes by promoting 
disaffection in and with all other causes. Of all the 
statesmen of the nineteenth century, Mr. Gladstone 
was preeminent in the promotion of disaffection. I 
do not know that he uprooted anything that deserved 
to remain among the habits or institutions of man- 
kind ; I do not know that he preserved anything that 
should have been cast upon the dust heap ; I do not 
know that he originated anything; but I always 
think of him as a great opportunist who was some- 
times on the right side, and quite as likely to be on 
the wrong. But he differed from other conspicuous 
opportunists in this : he always wrestled with the 
devil of unbelief. Before adopting a policy he 
would ask himself, " Is this right ?" If he adopted it, 
you would know that he was convinced of the right- 
eousness of his cause. That he had converted him- 
self, convinced himself by his own eloquence, did not 
make his conviction less sure, but made it perhaps, 
more clinching because he had talked himself into 
belief. His eloquence, therefore, had effect upon 
himself no less than upon others, as Lord Beacons- 
field more than implied when, in a political speech 
at Knightsbridge, in 1878, he alluded to Mr. Glad- 
stone as "a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with 
the exuberance of his own verbosity." 

If Mr. Gladstone has been credited too much and 
too often with all the qualities of a saint, it was, 
perhaps, because his opponents were always ready 
to attribute to him the traits of a devil. In our 
later time there has been no such adulation and no 



GLADSTONE 143 

such hatred as were poured upon him. And I take 
it that these excesses were due to his absorption in 
things, or subjects, rather than to interest in men. 
Individuals did not interest him ; causes did. The 
cause, whatever it might be, filled the universe. He 
could not see men, the people were so conspicuous. 

It may have been a fault, it was certainly a char- 
acteristic, that when he had once resolved, he ex- 
pected his followers to exchange, as quickly as him- 
self, old ways of thought for new. It did not occur 
to him until after the event that he had struck not 
only the wrong but the unpopular note in the Amer- 
ican Civil War. He saw the thing in one way only, 
and he was immensely surprised when he learned 
that there was another side to the question, and that 
it was taken by the country most concerned. But 
he did what he could and subsequently made a long 
and almost abject confession of error, which might 
have shaken, if it did not, the general appreciation 
of his powers of judgment. It will be said there 
was the case of Ireland. To be sure there was the 
case of Ireland. It is always with Britain, even if 
the Irish are not, — as in the war against Germany. 
But Mr. Gladstone understood Ireland and the Irish 
as little as, — well, as little as the Americans un- 
derstand them. Lord Salisbury, on a certain occa- 
sion, said that he (Salisbury) had never seen Mr. 
Parnell. Almost any one, then, might have repeated 
to him the famous injunction of Oxenstiern : "Go 
forth, my son, and see with how little wisdom the 
world is governed." 

Lord Salisbury did not know Parnell by sight, and 



144 LONDON DAYS 

he gave Heligoland to the Kaiser. Neither Parnell 
nor Heligoland were important enough in his opinion 
to justify even visual acquaintance. The world has 
suffered for his superior neglect in one particular, 
perhaps in both. But if he, or if Gladstone, or if 
Gladstone and Salisbury had foreseen what would 
happen, the world might not have acted any more 
wisely than it did. It is always too late to be wise. 
Nobody would have believed the oracles ; the truth 
was in opposition to the world's inclinations. It is 
usually so. And that is why great men are shunted 
to the wrong tracks, and so are "great" men only 
for their age and hour ; it is why prophets are stoned, 
and mediocrities arise and talk, prevailing by sound. 
Nowadays the eminence of men is fixed by their 
capacity for catching votes and the commotion they 
make in doing so. 

I thought Mr. Gladstone a vindictive old gentle- 
man. It was not the fashion to think of him in that 
way. You were supposed to insist upon his more 
saintly qualities, but there is some difficulty in asso- 
ciating attributes of saintship with eminent poli- 
ticians during their lifetime, and at the same moment 
keeping your face straight. The Roman Chm-ch, 
in its sagacity, defers consideration of saintship until 
long after the decease of the candidates for canoni- 
sation. Some centuries, indeed, are required before 
the purely human element in man may be superseded 
by the purely divine, even in cases where the voting 
majority is heavy. 

If Mr. Gladstone were not vindictive, I do not see 
how he contrived so successfully to give that char- 



GLADSTONE 145 

acter to his countenance when he was not speaking. 
One does not say when his countenance was in re- 
pose. Repose w^as unacquainted with his coun- 
tenance, or with any part of him. The energy which 
fully charged his body flowed through his mind in a 
restless and surging torrent. And if he were vindic- 
tive, I do not see anything strange, or much that is 
derogatory in that. A leader of politics must be 
genuine, or fall far short of greatness. His oppo- 
nents cannot be opposed to him merely in a parlia- 
mentary sense. They may be as genuine as he, but 
if he hates their acts as evil in nature and result, he 
cannot in honesty refrain from distrusting the men 
who lead and inspire the acts, though he may pre- 
tend as much as he pleases to do otherwise. His 
indignation against men and measures does not 
cease with the adjournment of the House, or with 
the close of an electioneering campaign, unless he is 
a hypocrite. And if he fail to pursue his public 
enemy for the purpose of making him ineffective for 
public harm, does he not give a too generous inter- 
pretation to public duty? That a man is to be 
hated only at certain hours, or when he says certain 
things, is conceivable only by the tolerant mass 
which must usually be told what to think, and which, 
nine times out of ten, can be relied upon to think 
to order, especially on party matters. A political 
party, in any country, is not intended for thinking 
purposes, but, like an army, is for fighting purposes. 
If it 's in, it fights to stay in ; if it 's out, it fights to 
get in. It uses speeches and programmes as mil- 
itary leaders use smoke-screens and gas-discharges, 



146 LONDON DAYS 

to obscure the real operations and confound the 
enemy. In the last century we had not learned, 
although we may have suspected, that the world 
must be made safe for hypocrisy. It remained for 
the twentieth century to announce this. 

A journalist who gets below the surface of things 
cannot remain a party man, for the more useful he is 
to one party the less useful he is to journalism. 
Sooner or later, and usually sooner than later, he 
must come up against the barbed wire which divides 
proprietary or editorial interests from the area of his 
own convictions. Perhaps the latter are less im- 
portant than they seem. But they may be more 
important. At any rate, like Touchstone's Audrey, 
they are his, and if he has a conscience, which is to 
be presumed, a conflict between his pen and his 
principles is bound to occur, unless his chief, or his 
employer, is a paragon of courage. 

"I can't afford the truth, as you call it," said an 
editor-proprietor one day, — it was over an article 
about Gladstone. "I must go with my public." 
He went with it, but his contributor did not. The 
latter was given the choice of resigning or writing. 
He did both. He wrote his resignation. How Mr. 
Gladstone heard of this I do not know, but hear of 
it he did. It was to his interest to side with the 
editor, as he did politically, but he met later the con- 
tumacious subordinate and said that he was glad 
to see a junior who stood by his principles and knew 
how to do so. 

"If I have any advantage over others," said the 
G. O. M., "it is the advantage of a long experience 



GLADSTONE 147 

which has taught me to value the quality that 
Cromwell attributed to his soldiers. Oliver said, 
'They make some conscience of what they do.' If 
we are not ruled by conscience, we are in anarchy. 
Good conscience makes for fair fighting in politics 
or war." 

"Yes, but, Mr. Gladstone, if the opponent does nH 
fight fairly.?" 

" 'Bear it that the opposed must beware of thee ! '" 

That is well as far as it goes. But we do not 
"fight by the book of arithmetic." Did "the 
opposed" in Mr. Gladstone's wars beware of him, 
or of his England.? One does not seem to recall 
their wariness. Not even the Mahdi's. Gordon 
fought with the front door open, so to speak. Glad- 
stone did not then "make the opposed beware" of 
his administration, i.e. England, for the time being. 
And there were other cases. Is it only one's own 
side that must beware of a policy of dilly-dally.? 
The "ecstatic madman", as Lord Acton, in one of 
his letters, called Gordon, gave the world furiously 
to think. But Gladstone knew what Gordon was 
when he sent him out. And it is more difficult now 
than it was then to relieve the venerable statesman 
of responsibility. Gladstone hated war. But his 
hatred of it did not make war any the less inevitable 
or less necessary. The enemy rejoiced because the 
G. O. M. hated war. Let the Pac'fists note ! 

Of the many times when I saw Gladstone at close 
range, I recall at the moment a night at the Lyceum 
Vvhile Irving was playing "The Merchant of Venice." 
From my seat it was easily possible to observe the 



148 LONDON DAYS 

Grand Old Man in his stall. The eagle eyes had 
always fascinated me. It was as interesting to 
watch his terrific face as to watch Irving. "Ter- 
rific" is not too strong a word. Gladstone's face 
during the Tubal scene reflected every emotion of 
vengeance that forced itself from Shylock's soul, and 
during the Trial scene he glared at Antonio with 
inquisitorial ferocity while Shylock whetted his 
knife. It would be the usual and conventional 
thing to describe this as a tribute to Irving's acting, 
and in support of this to quote Gladstone's appre- 
ciation of that distinguished man, "Shylock is his 
best, I think" — but the spectator at a play, if we may 
take Hamlet's word for it, is readier to show sym- 
pathy with the victim than with the tormentor ; and 
it was not until after Shylock had whetted his blade 
that he became changed from the victorious tor- 
turer to the abjectly tortured man. Up to that 
point Gladstone's face expressed demoniacal glee ; 
after it he did not appear to be interested. The 
psychologists and the partisans may quarrel over 
this as they please. I think that non-partisans 
who had much opportunity to study the old par- 
liamentarian's face at close range, amid varying 
conditions, will not quarrel over this interpretation, 
or with the adjective employed. 

Take another and a very different instance, when 
Gladstone was the central figure of a moving scene. 
It was a Liberal Conference at Manchester, in 
December, 1889. Gladstone had been ill. The 
press had reported him seriously ill. It was unlikely, 
the papers said, that he could again address a public 



GLADSTONE 149 

meeting, unlikely that he would reappear in the 
political field. But he appeared at Manchester, 
and his appearance drew the attention of all Liberal 
Britain, and a good share of its representative men 
in person. The immense hall was packed. The 
seats had been removed from the floor to make room 
for a greater throng than could otherwise gather. So 
close was the pressure that it was impossible to move 
one's arms, even to raise them. The audience 
worked itself, or rather was worked, to a high pitch 
of enthusiasm by a skilful organist who played upon 
them with patriotic songs and Scottish, Welsh, and 
English ballads. When the kettle was boiling mer- 
rily over this fire, and the lid rattling up and down, 
an old, grey head, world-famous, was seen rising 
through the platform-crowd, and the alert and ven- 
erable figure which carried it moved quickly to the 
front against a whirlwind of cheers. The roar was 
like that of a gale-driven sea beating against cliflFs. 
It did not cease until its idol had raised his hand for 
silence. When it had ceased he sat down, and the 
chairman called the meeting to order. 

A few minutes later, the chairman called upon 
Mr. Gladstone to speak. The G. O. M. rose to 
another outburst of welcome, and, upon obtaining 
silence, said : *' Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentle- 
men.'* And then the storm of cheering broke anew. 
It continued for a quarter of an hour, gaining con- 
stantly in force and volume. It was taken up in the 
crowded streets. It was a tempest of sound, within, 
without. The five words had started an avalanche ! 
When had those five words, or any five, unloosed 



150 LONDON DAYS 

such clamour? The voice that uttered them had 
boomed through the great hall like the discharges of 
big guns. The deep, strong tones, the alertness of 
motion, the flash of the eagle eyes, said to the as- 
semblage more than the words. Eighty years .^^ 
Yes, but eighty years young, with health, vigour, 
fighting power undiminished. The audience could 
not restrain its joy. Roar upon roar succeeded, 
wave upon wave of emotion rolled over the crowd ; 
it was a demonstration of thanksgiving, of congratu- 
lation, of delight. I have never seen or heard its 
equal in all the pageants, conventions, progresses, 
demonstrations of popular enthusiasm that I have 
witnessed in many parts of the world. Above them 
all this stands alone, unique in fervour and signifi- 
cance. 

"Standing as I do on the verge of four score 
years" — was the note to which the audience again 
responded. The shouting was a personal tribute, 
not merely a political one. I cannot remember what 
the G. O. M. said in his speech, but I remember that 
there was scarcely anything of a specific character 
concerning political measures or men. Gladstone 
was keeping his powder dry. He dealt in general- 
ities. He was always at his best when so dealing. 
He lifted his themes to an exalted pitch and did 
not wreck himself on details. 

It was only his greyness that acknowledged age. 
His voice was as deep and rich as ever it had been, 
his bearing as alert, his movements as graceful. He 
seemed to say, "It is impossible to grow old, but, as 
I cannot live forever, let us get on with the work in 



GLADSTONE 151 

hand." His capacity for believing that the moon 
is made of green cheese, and, what was more impor- 
tant, of making others believe it, was boundless. 
What was the spell he cast upon his hearers ? Even 
when he was in Opposition, perhaps because of that, 
for he was best then, the House of Commons would 
be crowded when he spoke. I have seen him at such 
a time switch on his green-cheese oratory and hold 
the House for an hour or two, tense, expectant, sub- 
missive under the spell. When he finished, great 
cheering would rise from both sides, — from his 
followers because they were charmed, or over- 
whelmed, and, being of his party, believed in the 
green-cheese theory and were ready to eat the 
cheese; from his opponents because they too were 
charmed, or all but overwhelmed, and for the 
moment forgot that fealty to their own party should 
have left the other side of the House to do the cheer- 
ing. If a vote could have been taken when Glad- 
stone ended his speech, the House would have been 
unanimous for cheese. But parliamentary proce- 
dure permits, or compels, a leading opponent to 
reply, and the reply broke the spell and recalled 
several hundred Britons to their partisan duties. 

It was always amusing to watch Gladstone's face 
when he came before an enthusiastic audience either 
in the outer world or within the House of Commons. 
As the cheers of welcome increased, he would look 
about him in a puzzled way, as if he were wondering 
what caused the demonstration, as if he were asking 
himself, "What have I done to be dragged from 
obscurity?" It has often been said that " he could 



152 LONDON DAYS 

have been a great actor." But he was one. It has 
also been said that he would have been a great 
archbishop. But archbishops in his time led such 
tame lives that Mr. Gladstone would have been 
discontented with the episcopal lot. It is easy, 
though, to imagine him cursing magnificently with 
bell, book, and candle. He was a great performer. 

His detachments were even more remarkable than 
the attachments of other men. No subject absorbed 
him save when he was working on it. That is 
another way of saying that his power of concentration 
was absolutely under control at all times. He would 
turn from the subject which he had dropped for the 
day to another subject which he would work at for 
half an hour, or six weeks, or six years, or a lifetime, 
and give all his energies to the task in hand, and 
yet be ready to concentrate at a minute's notice on 
whatever might turn up. They say he had no sense 
of humour. Perhaps they mean that he was not 
witty. Perhaps he did n't appreciate jokes. It is 
not always easy to know what "they" mean by a 
sense of humour. I have known Gladstone to keep 
the House of Commons laughing for a quarter of an 
hour by sheer exercise of the comic spirit, although 
it must be said that he did not often exercise this. 
But when he did it, there was purpose in it. The 
tragedy, that is to say, the serious business of the 
hour, was to follow. Seeing Gladstone in his great 
moments was like seeing Edwin Booth as Richelieu ; 
you had similar thrills, smiles, and satisfaction. 

Very few persons outside his family knew him 
really well, no matter how long they might have 



GLADSTONE 153 

been associated with him in public work. All the 
men who knew him that I knew agreed in one thing, 
however much they disagreed in others, — he had 
the spirit and the manner of command. A public 
gathering, a cabinet council, a dinner party were 
equally his. It will be remembered that he ad- 
dressed Queen Victoria as if she were a public meet- 
ing, and she did n't like it. But that illustrates 
what I mean when saying that he was not interested 
in persons but in causes, or subjects ; he was not 
interested in a dinner party but in what he had to 
tell it. The other guests — his hosts, too — might 
have been disembodied spirits, but it was he who 
would "communicate" with them, not they with 
him. He would detach himself from them as easily 
as from politics. 

He made his own "atmosphere", and it was often 
far removed from politics. Thus, at the approach 
of the political crisis of 1886, just before the House 
was to vote on his first Home Rule Bill, he was 
staying with his wife at Lord Aberdeen's house at 
Dollis Hill. A friend of mine, not a political per- 
sonage, was of the house party, and he told me how 
the G. O. M. would drive out from town alone, 
after dark, in an open carriage, and forget the fate 
of governments, especially his own, although that 
fate was to be decided within a few hours. 

Entering the drawing-room, he said, "While driv- 
ing out here from the House last evening I counted 
twenty-eight omnibuses going in one direction. 
To-day being Saturday, I thought the number would 
be larger than that, and I estimated thirty-five. I 



154 LONDON DAYS 

counted thirty-six." And then he discoursed on the 
increasing business of passenger transportation in 
the metropoUs. Not a word about politics. 

On the following afternoon (Sunday) the members 
of the Cabinet and other prominent partisans went 
out to Dollis Hill for an informal consultation with 
the Prime Minister. They were uneasy in their 
minds. The vote would be taken next day, and they 
might find themselves out of office, — as indeed they 
did for the six years following. The afternoon be- 
ing fine, they walked in the garden and discussed 
the perils of the situation, and waited for Mr. Glad- 
stone to summon them, or to come and join them. 
They continued to walk and wait. But Mr. Glad- 
stone did not appear, nor did he summon any one. 
But the Secretary for Ireland thought that he might 
be engaged with the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 
and the Home Secretary thought that he might be 
with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Still Glad- 
stone did not send word, and the political moun- 
tains waited for Mahomet. Concluding that the old 
gentleman was fatigued and had gone to his room for 
a nap, they began to retreat homeward. They left 
singly, and by twos and threes, after some hours of 
vain waiting. By and by the Gladstones appeared 
and told their host that they had had " a charming 
afternoon." They had strolled to the garden gate 
and had stopped to look at the view. The country 
road enticed them. They came to a pretty church, 
and as service was about to begin, they entered and 
remained for the benediction. They had returned 
slowly, but highly edified. The next day Gladstone 



GLADSTONE 155 

met his foes and was cast into the cold shades of 
opposition. Doubtless he had expected this, but, 
doubtless, he had not expected to be cast so deep, — 
six years' deep. 

I remember what a former ally of his had said to 
me just before the Manchester Conference: "No, I 
am not going to Manchester. I don't agree with 
Gladstone's Irish policy, but I know that if I were 
to go to Manchester I would shout with the rest." 
Those were days when the world had sunk far into 
the morasses of parliamentary talk. All things were 
to be settled by talking and voting and pious inten- 
tions. A complacent faith in Democracy was to 
save the world, if, indeed, the world were not already 
saved by it. In English-speaking countries it had 
become little short of dishonourable to praise naval 
and military valour ; and reliance upon force as the 
defence of a nation was thought to be unchristian. 
Democracy was to be shielded by its own virtue. 
We have heard that since the Great War, too. It 
is the old story of an old dream. Envy, hatred, and 
malice had departed from the world. There would 
be no more cause for great wars. The era of perpet- 
ual peace was about to dawn. Nations were to put 
their trust in a parliamentary God, a Deity of 
Congresses. When every one voted, there would 
be a new heaven on a new earth. The credulous 
invented a new kind of treason of which any one was 
accused when he expressed, publicly, doubts of the 
sanity of a democracy which could not see that the 
voter unprepared to defend his "sacred vote" by 
arms was risking his privilege, his goods, his kith and 



156 LONDON DAYS 

kin, was imperilling his right to live as a freeman. 
He had put his faith in words. Mr. Gladstone was 
the nineteenth century's greatest conjuror with 
words. But he was incapable of demanding, as 
Woodrow Wilson did, that a nation should be 
"neutral in thought", while freedom, the very right 
to think, was being beaten down. Gladstone would 
not have blundered like that, you say. But it was 
not a blunder, it was a crime. 



CHAPTER XI 

WHISTLER 

A FAMILIAR voice said, "Come !" 

It was Whistler's voice. I turned and answered, 
"All right. Where.?" 

The slender, dapper figure halted; over the 
quizzical face a look of astonishment flashed ; the 
flat-brimmed silk hat lifted perceptibly by the 
contortion of an eyebrow; and the immortal mon- 
ocle dropped into the right hand as was its habit 
when punctuating a sentence of its controller. 
The monocle was Whistler's question mark, his 
exclamation point, his full stop ; it served even as 
parenthesis when occasion demanded. 

"Where," replied Whistler, "where should an 
honest Londoner go at this hour but home to dine ? 
Come, then ! Escape the awful gaze of the rude 
world. We 're blocking Bond Street. Let 's call 
a worthy hansom." 

A hansom worthy of its fare was found by search- 
ing, — varnished, resplendent ; it bore a striped 
awning, and its driver was smart and wore a bouton- 
niere ; and its horse shone and arched a proud neck. 
We were at Chelsea in ten minutes. We were 



158 LONDON DAYS 

neighbours there. Stopping the cab at the Tower 
House, in Tite Street, Whistler alighted, exclaiming : 

"And the painter and his bride said 'come.' 
We are not out of the packing cases yet ; but come 
in. I 've something to show you. You must 
stay and dine, or I won't show you what it is." 

And we mounted to his flat. 

Mrs. Whistler knew that I was accustomed to 
"Jimmie's" ways, and so she affected no surprise 
when she met us at the door and learned that I had 
come to dinner. She merely said, as if it were all in 
the day's work : 

" We 've just moved in. Pardon the chairs. Let 's 
make a house warming of it." 

It was easy to "pardon the chairs", for there were 
none to pardon, — in the drawing-room to which 
I was shown. There were only unpacked packing 
cases. And I sat on one. Whistler turned on the 
lights and then darted into another room from which 
he returned speedily, showing his roguish smile 
and carrying in his hands a bundle of printer's 
proofs which he laid beside me on my packing case. 
Standing over them, screwing his monocle into his 
eye, he said : 

"There 's the thing I wanted to show you; my 
magnum opus : ' The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.' 
Do you mind looking 'em over, with an eye to cor- 
rection, while you wait ? My idea 's a brown paper 
cover like the 'Ten O'Clock.'" 

And with that he darted out again, returning 
immediately with a box of cigars and a case filled 
with cigarettes. 



WHISTLER 159 

"Burnt offering to the High Gods," he said. "I 
go to prepare the libations." 

And he went. 

Mrs. Whistler, after a few gracious words, went 
also, presumably to give directions for the table. 
I was left to myself, the packing cases, the proofs, 
and the cigars. My watch said seven thirty, and 
presently seven forty-five, and, on the heels of 
that, eight o'clock. I was interested, but I was 
also hungry. But neither of the Whistlers had yet 
reappeared. Meantime I read on and on, admiring 
immensely and chuckling every minute or two over 
the stupidities, the jealousies, the ridiculous follies 
of mankind as revealed in "The Gentle Art." And 
it was nine o'clock ! Jimmie came in with a fat 
bundle of newspaper clippings. 

"Read!" he cried. "Some of these should be 
included, don't you think so .5^ Hope you are not 
hungry !" Then he disappeared again. 

I was too hungry to smoke. 

There were sounds occasionally from beyond the 
closed door. Although noncommittal, they were 
encouraging; they at least indicated human pres- 
ence and the probability, in an uncertain future, of 
food. At nine forty-five I had reached the end of 
the proofs, the press clippings, and almost of pa- 
tience, when Jimmie came tripping in with panto- 
mimic action which meant abasement and a plea 
for mercy. Then said he : 

"I fear the Lord hath made me forgetful of time. 
But there 's atonement toward. Have you read 
'em? Oh, Sheridan, Sheridan Ford, thou naughty 



160 LONDON DAYS 

one, prepare for doom ! Madame, I pray you do 
the honours." 

And Mrs. Whistler, who had appeared behind 
him, enchanted me by saying, "Dinner is served." 

It was ten o'clock ! The Whistlerian hour. 

I do not know what they had been doing. Had 
they been unpacking china and linen and chairs, 
while the maid foraged the neighbouring shops? 
Had an unpremeditated feast produced itself by 
Jimmie's conjuring? Had Jimmie cooked the din- 
ner while Mrs. Whistler arranged the table with its 
dainty ware, and silver, and soft linen, and shaded 
lights? Or had they reversed the parts? I shall 
never know. But there was the daintiest, most 
delicious dinner, most charmingly served, and there 
were two or three kindly wines, a coffee that the 
master himself had prepared, and a soothing liqueur 
from his beloved Paris. It was a dinner that more 
than reconciled one to perishing on a packing case. 
And through it all Whistler summed up his 
philosophy of life and art, as previously and subse- 
quently he had set it forth elsewhere. We sat till 
long after midnight in high session, debating selec- 
tions from press clippings which had been showered 
upon him by his "excellent Romeike." "Shall 
I put in this, or omit that ? Here 's something too 
good to lose!" And so, with what he called "infi- 
nite jerriment ", another portion of " The Gentle Art " 
began to take shape. In its further progress I had 
no hand, as I was off to America in a day or two, 
and Jimmie needed no aid in goading his solicitors 
to the pursuit of Sheridan Ford who had, Whistler 



WHISTLER 161 

said, infringed his literary rights. The pursuit of 
Sheridan was an epic which aroused more than 
nine days' wonder ; it led from London to Antwerp, 
from Antwerp to Paris, from Paris to New York 
and back to London again. The "Extraordinary 
Piratical Plot" was defeated, the "piratical edi- 
tion" was suppressed, and, in the early summer of 
1890, there appeared, published by the graceful, 
sympathetic, and cordial aid of Mr. William Heine- 
mann The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly 
Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious 
Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been 
Prettily Spurred On to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, 
While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right. The 
dedication was no less characteristic : 

"To the rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid 
Themselves of the Friendship of the Many, these 
pathetic Papers are inscribed." 

Upon my return from America I found the Whist- 
lers established at Number 21 Cheyne Walk a few 
steps from my own door. It was not Whistler's 
good fortune to live long in any house, at any rate 
in those years. He had two years, or something 
less, at Tower House, and something less, I think, 
at Cheyne Walk, and, in April or May, 1892, he 
removed to Paris. After that I saw him but sel- 
dom, for my wanderings upon the face of the planet 
were to increase and multiply. But during the 
'88-'92 period he was often in my home. It was 
his peculiarity and privilege not to come when he 
was asked, or expected, but invariably to arrive as 
a sudden gift from the gods, and for the most part 



162 LONDON DAYS 

he chose the Sunday-evening "Smoke Talks" rather 
than the suppers, because at the latter he would 
be more likely to encounter some of "the Serious 
Ones of this Earth", already "carefully exasperated", 
in which case he would be bored, while at the former 
he would be sure to meet the choicest talkers at a 
late hour. He would drop in at eleven, or at mid- 
night, and stay till two in the morning with half a 
dozen congenial beings who would not only relish 
his wit, but sparkle with their own, and who were 
capable of appreciating him as an artist without 
requiring explanatory charts and diagrams. 

One such evening we had been talking of Carlyle, 
who had lived around the corner in Cheyne Row. 
Whistler told some pleasant anecdote of him. 

"There!" exclaimed Theodore Wores, a disciple 
of Whistler's, "I always thought Carlyle was not so 
black as he 's painted." 

Whistler sprang to his feet, and falling back in 
mock horror, cried, as he stared at Wores, " Et tu. 
Brute?" 

The room shook with laughter. 

On another occasion a well-known critic was lay- 
ing down the law about somebody's "technique." 
He appealed to Whistler for confirmation. 

"My dear fellow," said Whistler, "that's an 
opinion one would wish to express diffidently." 
Among his hearers was an artist accustomed to illus- 
trate in Punch some of the "Things one would wish 
to express differently." 

You know what Whistler said to the Prince of 
Wales (afterwards Edward VII) at an Exhibition 



WHISTLER 163 

of the Royal Society of British Artists. Whistler, 
recently elected president, was showing the Prince 
around the galleries. 

"What is the history of your Society?" asked the 
Prince. 

"It has none, Sir; its history begins to-day,'* 
was the quick reply. It fitted like a glove. There 
were sleepy years behind ; and anything you like 
later. Whistler stirred up the pools of somnolence. 
He did not stir them long, for the British artists of 
those days, whether or not they were interested in 
art, preferred Britons for presidents. I daresay they 
were right. 

One afternoon he came to my flat with the tall 
bamboo wand which he often used, in Chelsea at 
any rate, instead of a walking stick. He was of 
a phenomenal slenderness, which was emphasised 
by the long wand, and the long, flat-brimmed hat, 
and the long, black, tight coat. He had yellow 
gloves, and his little soft shoes — his feet were the 
smallest I ever saw on a man — were the last word 
in daintiness. No London maker could have pro- 
duced them. Jimmie was always, at all points, 
fastidious. He gesticulated more than any Briton, 
but his gesticulations were not Parisian, they were 
Whistlerian. He pointed dramatically to the ceil- 
ing and murmured, "White, all white." 

"White." Then to the walls — "All white. And 
a white you can wash ! Londoners forget that they 
must live in their houses in winter. All their colours 
are dismal, and there 's no sun." 

"Apropos?" I was about to enquire. 



164 LONDON DAYS 

"Didn't you tell me, the other day, that you 
intended redecorating this place?" 

"Sometime, when my ship comes in." 

"It doesn't need a ship. A navy wouldn't 
do for Cheyne Walk. May I offer a suggestion?" 

"The knowledge of a lifetime," said I, quoting 
his famous hit at the Ruskin trial. 

"Very well then; I '11 come in." 

And he went all around the flat, pointing here 
and there with his bamboo wand, and saying, " Such- 
and-such a colour here, and such a line there. My 
dear boy, this is the whole secret, — tone and line. 
The good colour — the right one — and the good 
line — the right one — cost no more than the wrong. 
People overlook these things ; they forget them, 
they ignore them altogether, and then have the mis- 
fortune to live. They don't go mad, because they 're 
British. And you '11 not, because you '11 have the 
right colour and the right line. Come. Let 's 
walk. I 'm free for the evening. We '11 dine at 
the Club." 

That was Whistler, Whistler the neighbour, the 
phase of him that I knew quite as well as any other 
phase. Later on, when I "did up" my flat, I re- 
membered the details of his suggestions, and carried 
them out. The result was that I had one of the 
most delightful flats in London. 

The appreciation of those who understood warmed 
his heart. He had had to fight his way from the 
beginning against the least imaginative, the stod- 
giest, the narrowest, the most unsympathetic crit- 
icism, and the most prejudiced, because the least 



WHISTLER 165 

enlightened public (as to art) in the world. But 
his fighting was not for his own hand merely; he 
was the champion of art as against ignorance, 
complacent or aggressive. 

It is difficult to believe now that for many years 
in the last century Whistler's work was opposed 
with rancour, or bitterly derided. Now the world 
salutes his memory as that of a master; then he 
was called a coxcomb, a charlatan, an impostor, 
excepting by "the rare Few" who had rid themselves 
of the blighting ignorances of the many. There 
were many pigmies who, because they walked on 
stilts, were thought to be giants in those days. 
Their stilts warped, or broke long ago, their lights 
have dimmed with the passing years, or their 
names are remembered merely as having been tar- 
gets for Whistler's wit. Had he not "killed" 
these men, their existence would have been forgotten. 

As I have said already, it was not Whistler the 
fighter, nor Whistler the "airy-incomprehensible" 
whom I saw most frequently in Carlyle Mansions, 
but Whistler the neighbour. I do not remember 
that any one has ever written of him in that char- 
acter. He used to drop in on dreary, rainy even- 
ings when, he said, "the world depressed" him, 
or when some happy stroke of fortune had gratified 
him. Or he would come on moonlit nights and gaze 
from my high windows where the views of Thames 
were quite remarkable, and drop his fighting mood, 
his satire, his butterfly attributes. I had called 
him "the butterfly with the sting." The phrase 
pleased him. "Yes, there you have me," he said. 



166 LONDON DAYS 

But he would drop the sting, and the monocle, and 
the air of the sprite, and would be quite human, 
almost "One of the serious of this Earth," One 
night he came jubilantly, and no sooner had he lost 
himself in a grandfather's chair by the fireplace, 
than he said, with a kind of moan : 

"He's gone!" 

"Who's gone?" I asked. 

"My old friend Thomas Carlyle. He lived with 
me many a year, and I sold him to-day for a base 
thousand pounds." This with a touch of sadness, 
permitting the monocle to drop into his right hand, 
and gazing reflectively at the fire. Then, with a 
sudden turn towards me: "The Mun-eeee-ci-pal 
Corrrrporration o' Glasgie has purchased it for its 
Arrt Museum." The monocle was thrust to the 
eye again where it seemed to flash the question, 
"What do you think of that?" 

I thought very well of it, and said something to the 
effect that it was a wise city which knew enough to 
buy such a masterpiece. 

"Surprising, is n't it ?" said Whistler, and then he 
told me that a committee of braw Scots had called 
at his studio to conduct the negotiations for Glas- 
gow. His mimicry of the baillies I will not try to 
reproduce here. Type cannot present it. Action, 
expression, accent, all are lost. It was a delightful 
imitation, and I shouted with laughter when Whistler 
mounted the climax of his story : 

"'But Mr. Wheestler,' said one of the baillies, 
by way of expostulation over the price I had modestly 
suggested, 'but Mr. Wheestler, this is a moderrn 



WHISTLER 167 

paainting, an' I ken that moderrn paintings mostly 
faade.' 

"Behold me there," continued Whistler, "the 
Butterfly Rampant, hotly retorting, ' Gentlemen ; 
you are mistaken. It is the damnation of modern 
paintings that they do not fade !'" 

It was about the same time that France bought 
that other masterpiece, the portrait of "The Artist's 
Mother." Whistler came to tell me a few hours 
after the transfer to Paris had been arranged. He 
said quietly, as if he were touched deeply, 

"France gives me honour, and I accept the invi- 
tation for Mother. Mother goes to the Luxembourg, 
and, after my death, to the Louvre. They pay her 
expenses, for what more does the honorarium amount 
to ^ It 's only one hundred and twenty pounds. But 
one cannot sell one's Mother. She will be glad that 
I am represented in the Luxembourg, and later in 
the Louvre. I am glad it is Mother who will repre- 
sent me." 

And then, probably because he feared that he 
was dropping into sentiment, he broke off gaily 
with a jest about "another ghost who haunted the 
pavements of Chelsea", a critic stung to death by 
the Butterfly, "the late Harry Q — " still haunting 
Tite Street. "The late Harry", it may be said to 
children of the present hour, was quite as much 
alive as Whistler, and occupied — Whistler said 
"haunted" — the house which Jimmie had built 
and which he had lost in bankruptcy. 

I had received from a friend in Boston a letter 
asking if I would "sound Whistler" about the proba- 



168 LONDON DAYS 

bility of his accepting a commission for the decora- 
tion of some part of the Public Library. The author- 
ities hesitated about approaching him. They had 
an idea that his attitude toward America was antag- 
onistic, they knew he was ** touchy" ; they did not 
wish to submit a proposal, or to invite a suggestion, 
that might, ninety-nine chances to one, evoke a 
scornful reply. He might tell them he was not a 
housepainter. "You are a friend of his. Won't 
you find out how he would receive a proposal, and 
advise us how best to make an approach.'^" 

One day when, like Rosalind, he was in "a com- 
ing-on disposition", I asked, "What is your real 
attitude towards America?" 

"I haven't any," said he. "How can a man 
have an attitude toward a continent? Oh, there 
are the discerning; more of them, perhaps, over 
there than here. But there 's no 'public taste' 
there nor here. There never was 'public taste' 
anywhere. There 's only the relation of beauty 
to the discerning. That 's all. But the American 
mind is not closed. The English mind is closed and 
bound. England wants art that tells stories. I 
want art that tells of beauty." 

"If the discerning in America were to say, 
* There 's Whistler now, an American; we wish 
him to do a great public work' — for instance, a room 
in the Boston Library, or something like that, — 
well, would you accept? 

" Of course ! It would be the evidence of discern- 
ment that I 've been waiting for. But there 's 
no chance of it." 



WHISTLER 169 

"Yes, there is ; I assure you there is." 

"If that 's true, I 'd really like it. I 'd like it 
immensely." 

"Hand on heart?" 

"Hand on heart!" 

The offer came to him, but, as far as I know, he 
never carried out the work. 

He left Chelsea soon after that, going to Paris 
to live. But before going to Paris he met, at my 
home, my dearest friend, of whom I shall write 
later. My friend is dead now, but he had produced 
then two excellent novels and a successful play. 
Whistler expressed an interest in him, and he looked 
in one evening to ask me if he might borrow the 
books. I lent them to him. Here is another aspect 
of his entertaining character. After he had been 
some months in Paris, I wrote to him reminding 
him of the volumes, which, for certain personal 
reasons, the author never permitted to be reprinted. 

Fatal error ! 

Whistler never replied. I never saw him again. 
But that was Travel's fault, not mine. I never 
heard again from Whistler. And he never returned 
the books ! 



CHAPTER XII 

HENRY DRUMMOND 

We were smoking churchwarden pipes and telHng 
how Jock This and Sandy That had made their 
money. I hope the Free Kirk folk will not be 
scandalised by the revelation, especially by that of 
the churchwardens. While Drummond lived I con- 
cealed this grievous sin, but now that he has been 
dead nigh upon a quarter of a century, I think he 
will fare no worse for it in heaven, whatever might 
have been the case in Glasgow in the early nineties. 
He wore a velvet smoking jacket, too, and we toasted 
our toes before his study fire on one of the worst 
nights it has ever been my fortune to see in Scot- 
land or elsewhere. The wind was lifting roofs and 
toppling chimneys to the ground, and the rain was 
like streams from a thousand fire engines. There 
was never a better night for a fireside. 

Jock This and Sandy That got into the conversa- 
tion (not bodily but in essence) because their expe- 
riences illustrated what Professor Drummond was 
saying about "getting on in the world." And he was 
saying these things because he liked talking other 
men's shop, not his own. The point he made was 
this : it is n't necessary to emigrate in order to pros- 



HENRY DRUMMOND 171 

per. He had been talking to a group of young men 
about this that very day. He had a way with him 
when talking to young men. 

"How do men get bored?" he asked. "I never 
get bored. I can be interested in something always. 
Time never drags on my hands. But Jock and 
Sandy can't get interested unless they are making 
more money, so they keep at it all the time. They 
are lost without their occupation. Money is a 
fine thing — to use. If you have n't it, the man 
who has it uses you as well as his money. Can we 
find the way to make money without becoming its 
slaves, as almost all men are who make it.-^" 

In the early nineties Henry Drummond was what 
they call "one of the best sellers." Who reads him 
now? I ask for information. If his books had 
been fiction, we could understand that the fashion 
had changed in twenty years. But has the fashion 
changed in God? 

Youth used to follow Drummond in troops. 
When he died more than the youth of Scotland 
mourned. But youth does not mourn long. It 
has in that respect the advantage of age, which 
usually makes new friends only with difficulty; 
youth has but to summon them, and they come. 
Drummond had an immense capacity for friendship. 
I have said he had a way with youth; yes, of both 
sexes and all ages. But his greatest friends were 
young men ; and his greatest friend of all was 
D. L. Moody, the revivalist. 

Drummond was saying, as we sat before the fire, 
drawing clouds from churchwardens : 



172 LONDON DAYS 

"I don't believe in old saws, do you? Now 
there 's : 

*" Early to bed, and early to rise. 

Make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.' 

"What nonsense! Healthy, if you like, but how 
wealthy and how wise is the manual labourer? 

"'Bed at dark, 
Up with the lark.' 

"Suppose you work with a night shift? Try 
bringing up a generation on these old wives' tales. 
But they 're merely an example of our British habit 
of trying to rule by phrases instead of by ideas." 

In the hall around the corner, I thought, they 
might suspect this sort of thing as inclining toward 
heresy. But you never can tell. "One man," 
as a proverb-muddled acquaintance of mine used 
to say, "one man may lead a horse to water, but 
another may not look over the fence." 

They were still buying Drummond's books in 
large quantities, — " Natural Law in the Spiritual 
World" and "The Greatest Thing in the World." 
I liked to think that the slender gentleman with 
longish hair, who was sartorially British to the nth 
power, could write things like that in the morning 
and in the evening keep me company with a church- 
warden, and these were very long churchwardens, 
old style, and we smoked "Glasgow Mild." Drum- 
mond, being a sensible man, wanted, as I say, to 
talk some other man's shop. He wanted to talk 
mine but could not pin me down. It was his shop 
I wanted. One of his young men with a literary 



HENRY DRUMMOND 173 

turn wished to go to America and become a journal- 
ist. Would I advise ? 

"Why America?" I enquired mildly. "You 
have admirable newspapers in Scotland. Besides, 
you were saying that 'it is n't necessary to emigrate 
in order to prosper.'" 

"It 's unkind to remind a man of his inconsisten- 
cies," said he. 

"I would like to save a good Scot, especially if 
young, from the mutilations of American journalism. 
More especially if literary. Tell him to learn the 
trade at home first. He '11 be trained more thor- 
oughly here. There they '11 put him 'on space' 
to the uttermost ruin of any literary gift he may 
have. Space-writing means word-spinning — the 
more words the more money, if you have the knack 
of escaping the blue pencil. Space- work will knock 
seven-ways-for-Sunday any literary turn he may 
have. American journalism will do that, anyhow." 

"Perhaps I 'd better kill him." 

"My dear sir, your American experiences have 
done you good." 

"They put me under gas and injected the spirit.'* 

And with that we heard the clock strike the hour 
when we should start for the place where he was to 
lecture that evening on "The Greater Gratitude." 

Professor Drummond, in "Natural Law in the 
Spiritual World", had attempted, as a clerical and 
friendly critic said, "to treat religion as a fact of 
nature, no less solid and capable of scientific analysis 
than any other fact which science claims for its 



174 LONDON DAYS 

own." Everybody read the book, for it was trans- 
lated into all the European languages. And every- 
body read its successor, "The Greatest Thing in 
the World." The volumes, which were small, 
carried the name of their author around the globe 
in a large way, for they came from the press in tens 
of thousands. I suppose he had a million readers, 
and the most these knew about him was that he 
held the professorship of natural science in the Free 
Church College at Glasgow, that he was but little 
over thirty when he wrote the little books, and that, 
for a year, he had disappeared in the wilds of Africa. 
He returned to find himself famous, or as some 
thought and said, notorious. 

He had fluttered the theologians, not flattered 
them. He was a theologian himself. His object 
was to stretch theology to man's size. The cham- 
pions of a hundred orthodoxies and heterodoxies 
chattered fiercely behind their bulwarks of texts. 
It seems a very small matter now, but, after all, it 
helped us all, for Drummond was a helpful man. 
He was a young man's man, and there you have 
one of the keys to him. 

To be a professor of anything in the Free Kirk 
College might imply that a man was hampered as 
to words and views. It was not so in Drummond's 
case, at any rate. I have said that he was a theolo- 
gian ; I will add that he was a geologist. When I 
knew him, he was famous and forty-two, and he 
had recently discovered in Glasgow the remains 
of a fossil forest. He had just returned from 
America, where he had been lecturing at the Lowell 



HENRY DRUMMOND 175 

Institute, in Boston, on "The Evolution of Man." 
How he laughed over his Boston surprise ! Of 
course he knew the Lowell Institute by name, but 
he had n't an idea of what it really was. He had 
supposed that he would have an audience of two or 
three dozen old fogies and a number of short-haired 
blue-stockings. He found the place crammed with 
alert human beings, mostly young, and all enthusi- 
astic. There was a greater crowd outside, hoping 
vainly to get in. His thought was, as he mounted 
the platform : " My lecture won't do. I must 
popularise it. There are no Dryasdusts here." 
He altered the lecture as he went along, and when 
he had finished, he returned to his hotel and under- 
took to rewrite all the lectures he had brought from 
Scotland. There were no fogies in the throngs 
that heard him. He had already been two or three 
times to America ; now he began to understand what 
it really was, — the country of the young. 

Drummond lived at Number 3 Park Circus, Glas- 
gow. He kept bachelor's hall there, and kept it 
very well, indeed. The house was spacious, "rich 
not gaudy", the rooms set in carved woods and 
trophies of ivory, and everything about them sug- 
gesting comfort and agreeable taste. It did not in 
the least suggest the abiding place of a theologian, 
Scottish or otherwise, and it did not hint at the 
granite-like hardness of the houses of some geologists 
I have known. If I say that we had jolly evenings 
there, smoking churchwardens and talking of travel, 
the life of cities, and Scottish tales, and New Eng- 
land and Old England, and the Academy, and books, 



176 LONDON DAYS 

and Gladstone, and Hyde Park, and the Rocky 
Mountains, it is only to show that theological- 
geologists can be human. Drummond was more 
than human ; he was companionable. He had always 
the appearance of ease, but he was a persistent 
worker. Work never drove him, though ; he held 
the reins over it and mastered it. If you had an 
appointment with him, the time was yours ; he had 
set it apart ; you were not made to feel that there 
was any pressure. This may seem a simple thing 
to do ; but, as most men live, it is not. 

Drummond's person was tall and slender; he 
had brown hair ; his eyes were — shall I call them 
brownish-grey ? — his moustache and short side 
whiskers inclined to a sandy tint; his voice was 
pleasing, and he shook hands with a hearty grip. 
He attracted you not so much by cordiality as by 
sincerity. He went to the point at once. 

I was making a study of British municipal policy 
and administration, with a view to certain move- 
ments in America. Drummond was helpful daily. 
He knew the things that had been done and the 
men who did them ; he knew the practical fellows 
and the extremists ; the men who worked at reforms 
and the men who merely talked about them ; the 
originators and the copyists ; the men who were out 
for politics and party, and the men who were out 
for the good they could do. And so I got at results 
and saved time and weariness, though not without 
much weariness and time. Down narrow, grimy 
streets, piloted by Bailie This, or Bailie That, or 
Superintendent Thus and So, or Overseer of T'other, 



HENRY DRUMMOND 177 

I went by day and night through the densest, soul- 
rending parts of Glasgow; up twisting flights of 
stairs, through murky alleys and through atrocious 
smells; people were shovelled there to live as they 
could. At every little distance we would come 
to spaces where old masonry was being levelled, and 
new bright buildings going up; lodging houses, 
tenements, model dwellings, bathhouses, feeding 
places, washing places, drying places, places where 
the sunlight and air could enter, could sweep about, 
— the municipality was overhauling things. 

I would return to Drummond's, rid myself of the 
everlasting Scotch mist, have a bath, a nap, a change 
of clothing, and then tuck my knees under his ma- 
hoganj^ tell about what I 'd seen, and the drenching, 
fatiguing day, and, "as sure as eggs is eggs", his 
explanations would bring in Moody. 

"That was Moody's doing," he would say; or 
*' Moody started us," or "Moody collected the 
money to begin this work, or that," or "Moody 
showed us the way." 

Moody was "the biggest man I ever knew," 
he said. 

"Then why not talk of him ?" 

"I 'd like nothing better. Unless you knew him, 
and knew him at work, you could n't half appreciate 
him." I feared I never did. "Well, then, take 
him as a manager of men — " and there would begin 
a run of anecdote showing that the renowned evan- 
gelist was a great organiser, and would have been as 
great in the business world, or the political world, 
or the military world, had he chosen to enter, as 



178 LONDON DAYS 

he had been in the hearts of Scotsmen, Englishmen, 
and Americans. 

Moody had discovered Edinburgh, or Edinburgh 
had discovered Moody; I was never quite sure 
which. Anyhow, Moody made Drummond dis- 
cover himself and his work in life, and that is the 
most important discovery a man can make. Drum- 
mond was a Scotsman of the Scots. He was born 
near the field of Bannockburn. He came of God- 
fearing folk, or as he preferred to say, God-loving. 
His father was a wealthy merchant, and meant 
that his boy should become a minister. But the 
boy took his theology without going in for orders. 
He made science his profession, and taught theology 
to scientists and science to theologians. 

"I would never be wholly off with the one, nor 
wholly on with the other," said he. "I am fond of 
both. And I believed that I was better as a geologist 
and botanist than I could possibly be as a preacher." 

When Moody and Sankey came to Scotland, the 
latter, with his keen capacity for selecting staff 
officers, selected Drummond as one of his. Drum- 
mond shared two years of labour with the American 
revivalists. They went through England, Scotland, 
Ireland. Then Moody and Sankey returned to 
America, and Drummond returned to his studies, 
religious and scientific, gained his professorship, 
taught his classes, wrote his books, carried on evan- 
gelical work among young men, geologised in Malta, 
Africa, and the Rocky Mountains, and found this 
a good world to live in if you knew how to work. 

We were reviewing his experiences one day. I said : 



HENRY DRUMMOND 179 

"You have omitted to mention a great advantage 
that you started with and have kept." 

"What's that?" he asked. 

"Money. You never had to work for your 
living. You were free to indulge your bent, your 
theological-evangelical-scientific bent, free to help 
your soul and work for the souls of others, without 
having to think about bills, or grind your powers 
for the taskmaster. Debt !" 

"Moody had n't a dollar when he began his work 
in Chicago," said Drummond. "See what he 
did!" 

"Moody was a genius. He made a business 
success before he gave himself to religious work. 
He had proved his greatest power — the manage- 
ment of men. You or I would have had to 
grapple with theology, or geology, or to swim in 
ink, once we had started and had been left to our- 
selves." 

"Perhaps." 

"No doubt about it. A poor man can be a theolo- 
gian, or a follower of science, but he can't be both, 
and explore the Rocky Mountains and Darkest 
Africa, and conduct soup kitchens in Glasgow, and 
do a two-years tour with Moody and Sankey." 

" That aspect had n't occurred to me. I am glad 
I was not compelled to have it occur to me," said 
Drummond. 

"A man needing money and unable to get it is 
like a machine without lubricating oil. Almost 
any man who has done much without money could 
have done more with it," I said. 



180 LONDON DAYS 

"You think so?" 

"Are we to think that friction is the best result?" 

"No," Drummond answered. 

"Some men can't make money because their 
work does n't run to it, or they may have the abihty, 
but not the desire, or they may not be able to afford 
to make money; you remember Agassiz's case. 
Perhaps he did n't need it." 

"Money-making is a special faculty," said Drum- 
mond. "A man has it or does n't have it, as he 
may or may not have a musical ear, an eye for 
colour, a delicate sense of smell, and so on. I know 
moneyed men, and I daresay you know others, who 
are duffers outside their special lines. Most men 
are duffers outside their special lines." 

"The defect of specialised training, eh?" 

"Possibly: like over-specialisation in the trades." 

"Cutting threads on screws for thirty years," 
said I. 

" Shall we say the same thing of theology ? Most 
men may overtrain in that." 

" They do. Therefore try mixing science with it." 

"That must dilute theology. A little too much 
science, and the theology becomes watery. But in 
the Roman Church they dilute the science." 

"Don't you think it depressing to listen to Carne- 
gie's cant about his intention to die poor?" I 
asked. "What else could he do? He says nothing 
about living as a poor man. Poverty is a 'blessing' 
that we all recognise in essays, sermons, and speeches, 
but we use all the strength we can to avoid the 
blessing, and we don't delude the poor with our 



HENRY DRUMMOND 181 

pretences. All of us like to use money as a force. 
Perhaps you would call it a mode of motion." 

"That sounds like Moody," said Drummond. 
"There 's the other side," he went on, "the deadly 
monotony of the lives of the average rich folk, 
deadly monotony, a weary existence dragged along 
without any interest in useful things. Take an 
interest in things ; that is the way to live ; not 
merely think about them. No man has a right to 
postpone his life for the sake of his thoughts. This is 
a real world, not a think world. Treat it as a real 
world — act !" 

"That is from your 'Programme of Christianity '," 
said I. 

"Yes. The might of those who build is greater 
than the might of those who retard." 

We got to talking about socialism. "Its basis," 
he said, "is materialism, not man. Herbert Spencer 
said : ' By no political alchemy can you get golden 
conduct out of leaden instincts.' And that 's a 
good standard for testing politicians. None better." 

Drummond was always looking at the bright side 
of life, illuminating it with common sense. And 
he loved a joke as well as anybody. He told with 
gusto of the fim he had at the Chicago Exhibition 
when, one evening, a dozen Arabs and Turks strode 
through the grounds, gazing gravely at the marvels 
of that western civilisation. 

"Marvellous," he repeated. "We shall never 
see anything like it again. Nor like those Arabs. 
If you could have seen them, as they passed from 
light to darkness at an exit gate, while, choking 



182 LONDON DAYS 

with laughter, they removed the sheets and pillow 
cases, and silk handkerchiefs, and colored table- 
cloths which had served them as robes and turbans 
and sashes, you would have said they were as 
marvellous as anything in the show. And when 
they wiped the colour from their faces, you would 
have recognised several of the most learned pro- 
fessors in America and one Scotsman with a smudge 
on his cheek." He roared at the recollection. 

He was a professor at twenty-five. And his 
pupils were university graduates studying for the 
ministry. It was part of their duty to study natural 
science, to know something about the world they 
would preach in and the stupidity of trying to dig 
science out of Scripture. Well, Drummond was the 
man for his work. And besides natural science, his 
work was for philanthropy and a rousing, liberalising 
evangelicism. At the end of his week in the class- 
room he would run over to Edinburgh and hold a 
religious service with a thousand young men attend- 
ing earnestly. 

"How do you get into personal touch with your 
college students ? " I asked him. 

"There you touch a tender point,'* he said. 
"There is n't enough personal touch in the colleges 
of Scotland ! We put too much faith in lectures. 
Young men come but rarely into personal touch 
with their professors. I knew very little of mine. 
And that 's the rule. A man must break through 
the routine ; the professor must, the student must. 
Personal touch would open both of them. Take 
So-and-So at the University. He lectures in the 



HENRY DRUMMOND 183 

morning to one hundred and fifty or two hundred 
students. In the afternoon to two hundred more. 
No personal touch in that; no opportunity for it. 
Youth can't be taught in droves, or saved in masses. 
And yet, if you go in for individual development, 
or by small groups, you multiply the work beyond 
all possibility. Our system is wrong. It neglects 
character for the sake of competition. But what 
can be done? Effort, individual effort, is the only 
thing worth a bawbee. All the rest is formulae." 

He said that, as far as his own efforts went, he 
did what he could, in every way that he could. The 
development of personal responsibility was what 
he drove at. "That's the aim and end of life. 
If you don't base education on it, what is the use of 
education .f* Come. We are responsible for our 
physical condition. Let 's go for a walk!" 

Even in Scotland there are moments without 
rain. Pallid things that might have been stars 
peeped through the scudding clouds. We walked 
on, with good, easy strides, and talked, — talked 
of patriotism for one thing. "We don't have to 
teach that in Scotland," he said. "We take it for 
granted. Every Scot is born with it. And there 's 
no immigration in Scotland. We 're luckier than 
you, in America, where you have — what is it ? A 
million a year pouring through the steerages ? I 
asked about that in my visits, but could n't find 
that you were teaching patriotism, except by fits 
and starts, in widely separated places. They were 
talking of teaching it there in the schools. What a 
funny idea ! School is n't the place to acquire pa- 



184 LONDON DAYS 

triotism. Home is ! But where you have immigra- 
tion on a huge scale the conditions differ, I confess." 

The talk swung over to Gladstone. Drummond 
was very friendly with him. I had said that I 
thought the G. O. M. a vindictive old gentleman. 
Drummond laughed: "Oh, but we worship him. 
We take him very seriously." 

"Yes, and he illustrates your favourite theory about 
taking an interest in things." 

"Right ! He is interested in things — movements, 
tendencies of thought, theology, religion, literature. 
I can't, though, quote him as an authority on science. 
But his interest, his active interest in things, keeps 
him fresh and young, and out of grooves. He is 
interested in things, in masses, nations, races, moun- 
tain ranges, literature, not art — literature above 
all, theological literature most of all." 

"In Home Rule but not in Home Rulers," I 
interrupted. 

"Does not the greater include the less?" 

"Sometimes," said I, "but in politics it does not 
include even what is set down in black and white. 
Where would you put Gladstone as compared with 
your other hero, Moody? Moody, you say, was 
the biggest human being you ever knew." 

"I won't retract that. Gladstone throws a greater 
spell over his hearers, and, when one meets him, 
an incomparable fascination. Moody's influence 
will last the longer, and so will his work." 

This was interesting, to say the least of it. Then 
we turned home. 

Four years later, Drummond died. Only forty-five ! 



CHAPTER XIII 

SIR HENRY IRVING 

Too much is said about the evanescent nature of 
an actor's fame. Is it so evanescent? Or are we 
believing, according to habit, merely what we have 
been told ? Burbage's fame has lived as long as 
Queen Elizabeth's, and that is long enough. Sup- 
pose the Great Queen's fame eventually should 
chance to live longer than that of her subject, what 
is there evanescent about the latter since it has lived 
already through the three hundred years which 
separate us from his death ? Betterton's fame may 
yet outlive that of the sovereigns under whom he 
flourished, — Charles II, William and Mary, and 
Queen Anne. What reason have we to suppose that 
it will not ? Betterton's name has been one of the 
highest, most honoured names in England for two 
centuries and a half. Garrick's fame has hved 
as long as Doctor Johnson's, and Garrick had 
no Boswell. Mrs. Siddons is as well known to-day 
as, say George III, and more favourably known. 
Talma's fame has not been eclipsed by Napoleon's. 
Of Rachel we know as much as of the Empress 
Josephine. It is easier to tell offhand who was a 
famous actor one hundred and fifty years ago than 



186 LONDON DAYS 

to say who was Prime Minister at the same time. 
Plunket was a greater orator, by all accounts, than 
Gladstone or Canning, Disraeli or Bright. Tell me 

— without looking him up in a Book of Reference 

— who was Plunket ? Who were the chancellors 
of exchequer during Henry Irving's reign .^^ Who 
were the leaders of the House of Commons? 
How long must fame last to satisfy all reasonable 
requirements.^ The names of how many princes, 
generals, preachers, statesmen, survive their deaths 
a hundred years ? 

An actor's fame, however short it may be, is long 
enough. How long has the fame of Roscius lasted ? 
An actor has more than fame. He has the public's 
affection, its money, its applause, its cheers. And he 
has these nightly, besides the name that lingers after 
death. How will you prove now that Macready's 
name is less well known than Macaulay's ? Are you 
safe in asserting that Edmund Kean's name will not 
add another century to its credit.'* Or Kemble's 
name? What reason is there for assuming that 
Byron's will live longer than that ? 

Even if the art of acting die, and the acted drama 
with it, overwhelmed by the cinema, it does not fol- 
low that the names and memories of the great 
players who have already lived will perish the more 
quickly. We may cherish them with a lively curi- 
osity as the eminent practisers of a lost art, cherish 
them, in fact, because we are no longer able to re- 
place them. The cinema could never have given us 
Sir Henry Irving, or the Kendals, the Bancrofts, or 
John Hare, or Edwin Booth, or Joseph Jefferson, or 



SIR HENRY IRVING 187 

Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. No, not if it un- 
reeled to a million spectators an hour, and its daily 
receipts exceeded the transactions at the Bank of 
England ! 

It is something to have lived till the second decade 
of the twentieth century turns the corner, and find 
that Irving still glows in the memory, Irving and the 
Lyceum nights. That glow makes the generation 
which has it richer than the generation which has it 
not. The Lyceum with Irving was as different from 
anything now known to London as was all Europe 
before the war. You cannot make the generation 
that is pressing on behind understand this. Words 
cannot do it. Moving pictures cannot do it. Im- 
agine a motion picture of "To be or not to be" ! 

There was once an art of acting. It is used now 
chiefly by politicians. But if their parts are more 
important, their presentation of them is less inter- 
esting than that of Irving and Ellen Terry, and the 
others mentioned here. And it is of no importance 
at all to art. The politicians will be remembered 
only for the troubles they bring to us and to pos- 
terity ; the actors are still remembered for the enjoy- 
ment they brought. 

We who saw Irving through his long reign know 
what the world lost in losing him, for we seek through 
the world and find nothing to take the place of that 
sovereign and his achievements, nothing at this day 
to suggest them even remotely. The lack is a gap 
in life. 

Will the gap ever be filled again.'' I doubt it. 
What chance is there of filling it.^* To begin with, 



188 LONDON DAYS 

they tell us every day that public taste does not run 
in that direction. It really does not seem to do so, 
that is certain. And as the survivors of an older 
tradition die, their tradition dies with them. Tradi- 
tion means more to the theatre than it means to 
other callings. Irving died in 1905. His tradition 
cannot be revived, that is clear. And it required 
traditions unbroken for nearly three hundred years 
to make the conditions for him. Broken now, for 
the first time in three centuries, who shall replace 
them-f^ And how? It may never be done. I do 
not say that it never will be done, but I do say that 
all the conditions of modern entertainment are 
against it. And the generation which furnishes the 
majority of the playgoers of to-day does not care a 
button. It is their affair, after all. And they 
cannot take from us what we have had. 

Irving was a kingly possession. He was as much 
a national figure as any statesman, or painter, or 
warrior, or popular personage of his time. He was a 
great man, and he worked to noble ends. No one 
could be in his presence without the consciousness of 
being in the presence, under the spell, if you like, of 
a great man. If one appreciates him more since his 
death, it is because the world is so much the poorer 
for his absence. We cannot say: "The King is 
dead ; long live the king." There is no king. There 
is not even a pretender. 

Irving's declamatory moments were often queer, 
but his handwriting was always almost the worst in 
the world. It was almost as bad as Horace Greeley's. 
I have letters from him which I cannot read to-day. 



SIR HENRY IRVING 189 

I have forgotten what they were about and appear 
to have kept no key to their mystery. But I con- 
nect with them pleasant recollections, for they never 
concerned anything that Irving wanted for himself, 
but always something that he wanted to do for some- 
body else, — an invitation to the play for some dis- 
tinguished visitor from my own country, a supper in 
the Beefsteak Rooms, a Sunday up the river, or 
something of the kind. If, at the time, the hiero- 
glyphics were indecipherable and could be associated 
with no known subject, I would take the letter to my 
neighbour, Bram Stoker, Irving's business manager 
and Fidus Achates, and adroitly prevail upon him 
for a translation. Usually, though, the letter from 
Irving would be followed, next post, by one from 
Stoker who would say: "The Chief tells me that 
you have kindly consented to so-and-so, or will 
bring So-and-So, or ask This-and-That ; do you mind 
my suggesting Thus-and-So .^^ " 

Stoker's handwriting was almost as cryptic as 
Irving's, but not quite. It could be read by due 
perseverance. And, at the worst, one could always 
know who wrote the first letter because Irving's 
signature was like a flight of stairs, and Stoker's — 
well, it was different. Whether Stoker followed up 
all the letters of his Chief with a translation I cannot 
say, and now that he has followed his Chief Out 
Beyond there is no one who can decipher the few 
remaining letters and so revive in my memory inci- 
dents which I am sure were charming and in every 
way delightful. I must get on without the letters. 

I saw the beginning and the end of Irving's man- 



190 LONDON DAYS 

agement of the Lyceum Theatre, and nearly all the 
brilliant achievements between the beginning and 
the end. Management ! It was more than a man- 
agement ; it was an august and splendid reign ! It 
lasted more than twenty years; it made victorious 
expeditions to America ; it seemed likely to end only 
with his life. And it did end only with his life. 
But the Lyceum, which he had made his home, 
which indeed he had made the chief temple of the 
drama in the English-speaking world, passed from 
his control as the nineteenth century died. He made 
valiant efforts to restore his kingdom, but the Fates 
prevailed against him. He went to Drury Lane for 
a while, but it was not his place, not his temple, not 
the centre to which he had drawn the world. He 
reigned now, but did not govern. He felt the change. 
Misfortunes had pressed upon him hotfoot. The 
splendour and pomp had vanished ; he withdrew from 
London ; he became a king in exile ; he died in the 
provinces. They gave him a stately funeral in 
Westminster Abbey. If they had supported him as 
liberally in his final years as they had in his pros- 
perous ones, I would not be inclined to scoff as I do 
sometimes when the Londoners flatter themselves on 
their loyalty to old favourites. And Irving would 
not have died, as I think he died, with a broken 
heart. But he was valiant and upstanding to the 
end. 

A public loyalty that can last twenty years is 
indeed marvellous at any time. The marvel is the 
more interesting in Irving's case. He served his 
public with all his power. They knew that. They 



SIR HENRY IRVING 191 

were conscious, I suppose, of Irving's limitations, 
but I am not sure that he himself was conscious of 
them. At any rate, his limitations set no bounds 
to his endeavours. And he achieved everything, — 
great fame, adulation, financial success ; he was more 
honoured than any other actor of his century ; his 
life was dignified, his death became the man. But 
what a marvel it was that this man could have be- 
come renowned among great actors ! 

He could not conquer his mannerisms, or he did 
not. The spectators had to do that, or ignore them. 
His mannerisms were dropped between the spec- 
tator and the performance like a veil. It was a 
thin veil, but none the less a veil. You saw him 
through the veil. Suddenly the veil would rise, 
there would be no mannerism ; as suddenly it would 
fall. And you heard him through strange obstacles. 
He could not walk, on the stage, without frequently 
strutting. Sometimes he did not talk, on the stage, 
without mouthing, marring the King's English. If 
he had learned, he had not mastered the elements of 
his calling. The elements mastered him. He had 
not the strength for what are called "sustained 
flights" of passion. And yet he would thrill you. 
There were times when he thrilled you with the sug- 
gestion of his meaning, rather than with the expres- 
sion of it. 

It is a commonplace of dramatic criticism to assert 
that there is not, and that there cannot be, such a 
thing as intellectual acting, because acting is con- 
cerned wholly with emotions. But Irving proved 
that what is impossible for the critics was possible 



192 LONDON DAYS 

for him. There were three aspects of any character 
he played which never could escape the appreciation 
of an audience : the inner character, his conception 
of it — the soul, if you will ; the meaning of the man, 
if you will not — that was the first aspect. The 
second was the picturesque aspect. Irving was 
always picturesque. He understood the appeal to 
the eye. Graceful he could not be, but he was 
always picturesque and always in the picture. The 
third aspect was the dramatic, the action through 
his personality. He could and did express every 
dramatic instant, every meaning, expressed them 
somehow, — by flashes of the mind, by movement, 
by simple gesture, by accentuation of line, by lights, 
by shades. It was acting illuminated by intellect. 
Whatever he did had behind it a powerful and 
searching mind, and you came to regard it for its 
operations. And your admiration of him, if you did 
admire him, was intellectual rather than emotional. 
You liked him, or you disliked him. There was 
no halfway. I am speaking of him now as an actor, 
not as an actor-manager. When I first saw him, I 
thought him the worst actor there could be in the 
world. I was young then, but I had seen much fine 
acting, great acting. I had grown almost to man- 
hood under the great art of Edwin Booth. Hamlet 
was the first part I saw Irving play. I suppose that, 
even then, I knew the lines almost as well as Irving 
himself. I thought he was speaking Choctaw, or 
Yorkshirese. His vowels confounded him. They 
confused me. The effect was distressing. After 
Hamlet I had seen him, during '79, in revivals of 



SIR HENRY IRVING 193 

"Richelieu" (which did not impress me much), 
"Charles I" (which did impress me), "Eugene 
Aram", "The Bells", and one or two other parts. 
It was on November 1, 1879, that he produced "The 
Merchant of Venice." This was the first of the 
"great productions" at the Lyceum under his man- 
agement. His reign actually began then, for then 
he began fully to exercise his powers. The Tubal 
scene revealed all Irving's defects; they stood be- 
tween his Shylock and my eyes and ears ; they 
barked at me, jumped at me like grotesque mani- 
kins ; I sympathised with the old lady who is reported 
to have said, after an hour of Irving's Hamlet : 
"Does that young man come on often? If he does, 
I '11 go home!" 

But there were other moments which denied the 
Tubal scene altogether. That was forgotten as if 
it never had been. Shylock grew under your eye, 
inner man and outer man. The presentation of the 
entire play felt the magic of the poet-author, the 
poetic powers of the manager. I began to under- 
stand what Irving was — the actor-manager with a 
poetic spirit. 

Possibly the full impact of the shock of his strange 
personality had worn down its effects by this time. 
And I had come to know London better. I had had 
a year of it, and in that time had heard all there was 
to hear about Irving. His name and his doings were 
talked of everywhere ; the Lyceum, where he had 
acted several years under Bateman's management, 
had become a British institution ; and Irving was as 
much talked of, everywhere, as the Prince of Wales, 



194 LONDON DAYS 

Mr. Gladstone, or the weather. Discussion of his 
mannerisms was inevitable at any dinner party or 
afternoon tea. Burlesques of him were frequent, 
imitations of him were part of the stock-in-trade of 
weary comedians and gifted amateurs. But, in 
spite of all the skits and all the laughter, every one 
respected the man and his work, and knew he was a 
genius. 

When his Shylock came, the awkwardness of the 
actor was concealed by the costume, or what was 
not so concealed became apparently characteristic 
of the Jew. If the Tubal scene showed him almost 
tone-bound and muscle-bound, the other scenes 
found him free of many of his aflSictions. 

Actor-manager with the poetic spirit ! Those 
Lyceum nights were quite Arabian. How fully I 
realise that as I look back upon them more than 
forty years after. The pit nights at the play were 
the best nights I ever knew at the play, wherever 
the pit, but not, it must be acknowledged, whatever 
the play. When I ceased to be a pitite, and my 
connections with the press thrust me a few feet 
nearer the footlights, half the pleasure of theatre- 
going vanished, never to return. What had been a 
joyous zest became plain duty which had to be ful- 
filled whatever the conditions. As a pitite one went 
to the play for the fun of the thing; as a stallite he 
went in quest of "copy." As a pitite one had the 
pleasure of anticipation. Even the fatigue of wait- 
ing hours at the doors, and going without dinner, 
had compensations ; one knew that at least he had 
capacity for endurance. One had, in brief, enthu- 



SIR HENRY IRVING 195 

siasm. One does not have enthusiasm in the stalls, 
or does not display it. In the pit he lets it loose. 
There is nothing so contagious as an expressed en- 
thusiasm for a thing, or against it. And the pitite 
is always conscious of the fact that man is a gre- 
garious animal. The stallite has forgotten this, if 
ever he knew it. He may not prefer segregation, 
but he is the victim of it. The usages are stronger 
than his feelings. The pitite's feelings come first. 
That is why the pit is important to the London 
actor, whatever it may be to the box office. 

I have mentioned the first night of Irving's "Mer- 
chant of Venice." That was November 1, 1879. 
I was in the very front of the crowd that waited five 
hours in the old covered passage that led up from 
the Strand. There were no queues in those days. 
Only the strong faced that struggle at the doors. 
You stood hours in the swelter, and then when the 
bolts were heard thrusting back from their rings, 
you thrust yourself back against the crowd, which 
surged and pressed behind you, and was pressed 
again by the less fortunate beings in the distant rear. 
The tactical manoeuvres consisted in avoiding the 
door frame while you clung to your half-crown and 
leaned heavily against your neighbour who was 
hurled against your ribs. The strategy was to know 
which half of the door opened first and directly op- 
posite the hole behind which the ticket seller stood 
ready for action. If you lowered your arms you 
were helpless in the crowd. The art was to hold 
them in front of you, breast high, with your half- 
crown clenched in your left hand, because that was 



196 LONDON DAYS 

nearer the box office. If you put your hand in your 
pocket, you were lost, the crowd would rush you 
aside. If you muddled for change, they roared at 
you. Your left hand slapped your half-crown on 
the ledge, your right snatched the pit-check which 
slid across to you ; you ran past the ticket collector, 
shoving the check into his hand and, making a 
sharp turn to the left, dashed along the benches until 
you came to the middle of the pit, and then went 
over the tops of bench-backs until you had captured 
your place in the centre of the front row ! You had 
won the best place in the house ! A barrier sepa- 
rated you by half an inch from the last row of the 
stalls. You were cheek by jowl with the mighty. 
You saw the celebrities of London arrive, you heard 
them chat; you saw them make others uncom- 
fortable as they uncomfortably squeezed their way 
to their seats (for the Lyceum stalls were set closely) 
and as they entered your neighbour would tell you 
who they were, or you would tell him. 

It was in the pit of London's theatres that I first 
came to know the London crowd, to understand it, 
to share its enthusiasms, or the reverse. It was in 
the Lyceum pit that I came to know how the crowd 
adored Irving, the place Ellen Terry had in its heart, 
and the place traditions held in the heart of the pit. 
Are there such pitites now, I wonder, as there were 
thirty and forty years ago ? 

Those first nights with the first favourites dis- 
solved my American notions of the British character. 
I had heard, with the rest of the outer world, that the 
British were stolid, phlegmatic, cold, and what not, 



SIR HENRY IRVING 197 

that they repressed their emotions, that they would 
not and could not let themselves go. I was to find 
what everybody finds, sooner or later, — that the 
individual and the mass differ as chalk from cheese. 
The pit crowds were not icebergs ; they had not 
the immobility of mountains. They laughed, they 
wept, they cheered ; they unlocked their emotions. 
They were the most sentimental, the most enthusi- 
astic, the most appreciative crowds I had ever seen. 
The individual was dissolved in the mass. He 
became natural man. The crowds always took fire 
from a spark. They received their favourites as if 
they were conquering heroes. Irving, their greatest 
favourite, they received like a reigning monarch. 
One has to learn this about the British ; their hearts 
are big and near their skins, and that is why, as 
individuals, they armour them. 

If you know how to touch them, they respond 
with such demonstrations of devotion, of enthu- 
siasm, of loyalty, as no other race ever equals in our 
time. Their loyalty to Irving they expressed with 
a zeal that was greater even than their appreciation 
of his powers, immense as that appreciation was. 
They loved the man. He embodied for them 
another lofty mark in the records of English achieve- 
ment. He was great and would be greater by the 
integrity, the persistence, the elevation of his pur- 
pose. Such qualities win the English, and deep is 
the loyalty with which England rewards them. 
That, at all events, was true in the Victorian days. 

There was a blessed vision called Ellen Terry, in 
those far-away Lyceum nights. Her power was 



198 LONDON DAYS 

charm. And she wielded her power almost to the 
end of King Henry's reign. In comedy she was 
alluring, audacious, delightful, — as Portia, for in- 
stance; as Beatrice; as any number of arch, grace- 
ful, incomparable creatures. In tragedy, — well, 
we forgave her the tragedies, her Lady Macbeth, 
for example. As Ophelia there was nothing to for- 
give ; as Juliet — here was the exception to her 
tragic parts ; she was a poet's dream, a fragile, loving, 
playful thing enmeshed by fate and borne down to 
death. Ellen Terry was the witching consort of 
Irving's reign. She won half his battle. "A star 
danced, and under that" she "was born." When 
Father Time told her that she could not play Portia 
and Beatrice and Juliet any more, half the attrac- 
tiveness of the Lyceum was gone, and Irving had to 
carry the load alone. 

But I have wandered far from the first night of 
*'The Merchant of Venice." It was a great occa- 
sion. "Everybody" was there. To my gratified 
eyes the audience was nearly as interesting as the 
play and the players. Celebrities were "as plenty 
as blackberries." Now forty years have gone, and 
the celebrities have gone with them. And the non- 
entities, too. Of the two thousand or more per- 
sons who saw the performance that night, it may 
be that not more than fifty survive. 

There is no one in these days to rouse us as we 
were roused in the late seventies and to the end of 
the century. The playgoer of to-day is fed on other 
stuff, on experiences quite unlike those his prede- 
cessors knew. And he is not fed so well. He is 



SIR HENRY IRVING 199 

growing up, or has grown up, without standards. 
All 's fish that comes to his net. I wonder what he 
would think of Irving if, by miracle, Irving could 
return to the Lyceum with undiminished powers, 
with Ellen Terry as she was in the eighties, and all 
the galaxy and circumstance that surrounded them ? 
I think the playgoer of the present would scarcely 
notice Irving's mannerisms of speech, of gesture, of 
gait, he has seen so many mannerisms almost equally 
quaint, heard so much speech that is quite as queer. 
What caused Irving's mannerisms ? For the life 
of me I cannot tell. They were not always with 
him. They grew upon him with the seasons. I do 
not think he affected them. He was too honest, too 
sincere for affectations. Besides, he did not need 
them to attract attention. And they injured his 
work. They were not caused by physical defects. 
They were entirely absent when he was not acting. 
Then his movements and speech were easy, pleasing. 
His manner had great dignity. I have said that his 
mannerisms were not with him in all characters, nor 
at all times. Intensity might bring them out. 
Declamation did so almost invariably. But they 
could not be relied upon either for coming or for 
going. What caused them ? Self-consciousness per- 
haps, nervousness possibly. But why should he be 
self-conscious or nervous in his own theatre, where 
he played every night, and show no trace of either 
when he spoke at a university, or a dinner, or a 
public meeting ? Why should he walk naturally and 
with ease in Bond Street, and with constraint, as if 
he were rheumatic, as Hamlet, at Elsinore, and why 



200 LONDON DAYS 

should he speak with perturbed vowels when he was 
in costume, and in easy control of them when in 
ordinary dress ? The questions are easily asked ; 
they have never been answered. If I have dwelt 
upon his peculiarities, it is partly because no one 
could ignore them, but mainly because he was so 
great a man that we can measure his powers by the 
obstacles against which he contended. His pecu- 
liarities of speech and motion may have been the 
causes which retarded his advancement for so many 
years. And, by the way, he was born in Somerset- 
shire. Perhaps it was the Somersetshire dialect 
that cropped out at times in his delivery. 

Irving's maltreatment of vowels gave much of- 
fence to trained ears. I do not know when I ceased, 
if ever I did cease, to wince at some of his pronun- 
ciations, but with time they ceased to present them- 
selves as crimes for scourging, and came to be re- 
garded as misfortunes, as penalties that must be 
endured for seeing him and enjoying him. When 
all is said, this thought remains, — the Lyceum 
productions were immensely satisfying; the beauty 
of them, the appeal to the eye, the appropriateness 
of everything that was painted, or woven, or said, 
or done; the groupings, the general and partic- 
ular movement, whether of principals or super- 
numeraries, the tone of the thing, the atmosphere 
of it. When was the like known before? When 
since ? 

Seeing through the fog of mannerism took me a 
year. After that, as I have said, I grew gradually 
to appreciate him, to admire him. When I made 



SIR HENRY IRVING 201 

his acquaintance, ten years after first seeing his 
Hamlet, I had long passed from the benches of 
opposition. But even then the wonder grew. First 
it had been : how did this man of many mannerisms 
ever become an actor and one of the most dis- 
tinguished actors of his time ? And then it was : 
how does he escape from carrying his mannerisms 
into private life ? For he did not carry them there. 
He was a natural, unaffected gentleman, distin- 
guished in bearing, courteous, fine in dignity, with- 
out pose. He walked and talked like a human 
being accustomed to the best of intellectual society, 
accustomed, indeed, to the ruling of men. He was 
then neither tone-bound nor muscle-bound. He 
moved with a certain ease, spoke with exquisite 
courtesy and quiet, and did not speak too much. 
He preferred to listen rather than to talk. He 
could — and did — make excellent speeches after 
dinner, or before the curtain. They would always 
have a touch of humour and a touch of pathos. 
They would always be in earnest. He never spent 
himself on trivial things ; he never trifled about 
anything. 

He had a certain air of authority ; he had, at any 
rate, earned the right to breathe it. Besides, it 
protected him from bores. It made him, as a 
listener, the more gracious by just the suggestion of 
deference to an opinion, especially when he had 
invited the opinion. He preferred flattering to 
being flattered. Perhaps discreet flattery was an 
instrument that he knew how to employ better than 
most men. It may have been on that account that 



202 LONDON DAYS 

when it came his way he did not care for it. In all 
things he preferred giving to receiving. 

Next to his work he enjoyed hospitality, that is, 
the exercise of hospitality. He did not like going 
out, and very seldom went out to dinners and 
receptions, those affairs of which one grows weary 
in London, because there are so many of them, and 
the celebrity is so often a sacrifice. He enjoyed 
being the host. This gave him the right of selec- 
tion, with the minimum of sacrifice. 

And what a host he was ! You saw him at his 
best then, I think, his Majesty in evening dress, 
presiding at his table, after the play. You had seen 
him crowned and robed and reigning, heard him 
cheered by his loyal subjects, the British public, and 
now you were to sup with him after the play. His 
guests — they might be two, or six, or a dozen — 
would be shown to a suite of historic rooms up- 
stairs behind the scenes, the rooms which in the 
eighteenth century and later had belonged to The 
Sublime Society of Beefsteaks. Perhaps, that night, 
the play had finished at eleven. The green curtain 
seldom fell earlier at the Lyceum. In fifteen or 
twenty minutes Irving would come in. If Miss 
Terry were coming, she would be later. An actress 
is usually longer than an actor about "changing." 
But whether she came, or not, and she would not 
always come, the feast would be a memorable one, 
both as to company and to dishes, to coffee and 
cigars and wines. 

In those days teetotalism did not stalk over the 
world, and arrogantly claim all the virtues, and cry 



SIR HENRY IRVING 203 

tyrannically, "You shall not touch wine! There 
are weak souls who cannot drink without drunk- 
enness. To protect them we shall deprive you!" 
A lot of kindly feeling has vanished with the rise of 
Bolshevism, Syndicalism, and Teetotalism. Are we 
coming to a time when Shaving will be forbidden 
because razors are dangerous? If there are people 
who drink to excess, are there none who eat exces- 
sively? Are dyspepsia and indigestion to reduce 
the world to a common level of sallowness and pain, 
to the pangs and palenesses that prevail in teetotal 
regions? What has all this to do with Henry Ir- 
ving? Nothing, of course, seeing that he died in 
1905. But were he living and in his prime, I can 
fancy him saying, as many another man is saying : 
"No more America for me. They won't let me have 
a pint of wine with my dinner. I believe in 
freedom." 

Irving's first nights were famous for their supper 
parties. These were not given in the Beefsteak 
Rooms but on the stage. The stage would be 
cleared after the play, and at long tables, at the 
rear of it, the guests would help themselves, and 
stroll about, smoking, talking, munching chicken 
sandwiches and salad, and sipping champagne, 
claret, or whatever was going. There would be two 
or three hundred guests, possibly more, men and 
women titled and untitled, well known in politics, 
science, letters, art, and social leaders, generals, and 
admirals, an epitome of that world which is London. 
It would be one of the most enjoyable receptions of 
the season. Wearied with conversation and stand- 



204 LONDON DAYS 

ing about, the guests would begin to disperse about 
one or half-past one in the morning. By two 
o'clock, usually, nearly all of them would be gone. 
Then some one would find a few chairs, and half a 
dozen of us would sit in a corner talking, and pres- 
ently Irving would join us, and the talk would gain 
in weight and point. About three o'clock, I think 
it was seldom earlier, we would start homeward. 
Frequently Irving and I would go together. My 
hansom would drop him at the door of his chambers 
in Grafton Street, and then I would go on to Chelsea. 
But whether on first nights, or on other nights, this 
was our custom for ten years, a custom broken only 
by my increasing absences from London. I might 
be in New York or Washington, or Rome, but Ir- 
ving would know somehow, and we would exchange 
wires on first nights. On his first night in the 
World Beyond, I was farther away than usual. I 
was in Chicago. I wondered, when I heard, next 
morning, that he had gone, whether he missed the 
little group that used to foregather with him, and 
what hansom had conveyed him after his life's 
drama, and who had accompanied him Home. 
Always he had seemed to me a lonely man. He was 
a generous man and a great one. And his fame will 
last as long as the English stage retains its fame. 



CHAPTER XIV 

HENRY M. STANLEY 

Stanley was the most self-contained man imag- 
inable, when he chose to be. And when he chose 
to be otherwise, his anger was terrific. He had a 
hard face and steely-cold grey eyes. Neither eyes 
nor face revealed what he felt, if he wished to con- 
ceal feeling. I have seen him quite unmoved, rock- 
like, when, after an African expedition, he met de- 
voted friends, or faced a cheering multitude, or 
drove his way through an angry mob. All was one 
to him if he had to get anything, or go anywhere, 
or do anything. None the less he felt, and his 
feelings were deep, but he held them in the closest 
grip. But when his temper blazed you wanted to 
call out the engines. He could not tolerate blunder- 
ers and fools ; he had no patience with reformers, 
nor with sentimentalists ; and very little with Emin 
Pasha, whom he came to regard as possessing the 
"mushy" qualities. Perhaps I should say that he 
had a great deal of patience with Emin Pasha in 
view of the fact that Emin, while willing to be found, 
did not wish to be "rescued", and so Stanley had 
his aches and pains and hardships for his trouble. 
It is possible to sympathise with him. 

Stanley returned to London in April, 1890, after 



206 LONDON DAYS 

the Emin Expedition. There were crowds to greet 
him in the streets, and a big crowd at the railway 
station. I went, with an old friend of his, to meet 
him at the train. We had special cards to the plat- 
form at which the train would arrive, and were 
fortunate enough to secure places at the point where 
Stanley's saloon carriage stopped. There were about 
five hundred holders of similar cards, I should think, 
and among them the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who 
was a very old friend of Stanley. When the train 
pulled in, the privileged five hundred broke ranks 
with a rush and a roar and a waving of hats and 
handkerchiefs. The crowd beyond the platform 
barriers took up the cheering. As everybody on 
the platform knew the Baroness by sight, a path to 
Stanley was promptly cleared for her, and im- 
mediately the explorer advanced and shook hands 
with the kindly old lady. But he did not smile. 
He was as grim as a statue. He lifted his hat two 
or three times to the crowd, but he scarcely looked 
at it. He seemed in no way elated or touched by 
the popular greeting, but I suppose he was touched. 

As soon as he saw the Baroness, he removed his 
hat, carrying it in his left hand, and stepping forward 
quickly, held out his right. But he did not speak ; 
nor did she. Her kind old face quivered a little, 
and there were tears in her eyes. Perhaps if she 
had spoken, she would have shown too much emotion. 
Stanley, I thought, realised this, and was silent. 
But he kept the old lady's hand in his and shook 
it a little every instant or so, while he looked out 
over the mass of faces beyond. When he recognised 



HENRY M. STANLEY 207 

any one standing near him, he nodded, but said never 
a word ; he would look again at the venerable lady, 
and give her hand another little shake, and then, 
when all was ready, he gave her his arm and es- 
corted her to her carriage, her husband following. 
The three entered the carriage, and Stanley stood 
up, bareheaded, and bowed to the cheering crowd. 
But never a word spoke he. 

Out of the station they drove amid a din of cheer- 
ing, but still he maintained his silence. One of 
them told me afterwards that he was silent until 
they reached their door in Stratton Street, Picca- 
dilly. All the way the crowds cheered. Sometimes, 
when the roar was unusually loud, he would lift his 
hat. Then, when the spectators saw that his close- 
cut hair had turned white, they would double their 
cheers. I don't know what men think about when 
they experience such moments. I have asked many 
who have had them. They seemed to think that 
they were gratified, or puzzled, or stunned. I can 
imagine Stanley asking himself: "When can I get 
out of this.f^" But his face might have been the 
face of a graven image, — say a Sphinx from the 
sands of North Africa. 

The next time I saw him in public was at St. 
James' Hall, about a week later, when he addressed 
an audience invited by the Emin Pasha Relief Com- 
mittee. It was a ribboned and jewelled audience ; 
it was composed of royalties, nobilities, famous 
commoners and fighting men, diplomats who sparkled 
and bishops who did not, men of letters, men of 
science and art, not to mention their radiant ladies. 



208 LONDON DAYS 

an audience which literally shone, for the affair 
was an "occasion." The Prince of Wales (afterward 
King Edward VII) presided; his Princess and the 
present King sat in the front row. If I were to give 
a list of "among those present" it would exhaust 
pages of "Debrett" and "Who's Who", to say 
nothing of my own pages. The Emin Pasha Re- 
lief Committee had done the thing handsomely, as 
well they might, for this was Stanley's first public 
appearance since his return from the expedition of 
which the world babbled long. It was all in the 
day's work for him. He never turned a hair. He 
was in command of that audience, he told it what 
he wished to tell it, quietly, resolutely, and his words 
went home. They would have thought he ad- 
dressed such audiences every night. But he had 
spoken in circumstances far more difficult. 

At the proper moment he took his manuscript 
in hand and walked to the edge of the platform. 
When the audience had finished its applauding wel- 
come, he looked about for a reading desk, or a table, 
on which he might put his papers. He seemed 
puzzled, and I daresay he was, that the committee 
of the occasion had not provided something of the 
kind. The Prince of Wales was quick to perceive 
his need, and picking up a small table that stood 
in front of his own chair, he carried it to Stanley 
and placed it in front of him. Then the explorer 
smiled, bowed, and thanked the Prince, and, turning 
to his audience, he fitted a pair of gold-bowed 
spectacles before his eyes and plunged at once into 
his address. 



HENRY M. STANLEY 209 

He told simply, directly, without oratorical 
flourishes, but as a courageous man to whom dangers 
were familiar, the story of that awful march into 
the heart of Africa. It was a famous march then. 
The world has since forgotten it, I daresay, having 
had, for years, its fill of deadly suffering. But it 
is worth remembering as a tale of heroism, and I 
am able to repeat here some of the passages which I 
preserved at the time. Stairs-, and Parke, and 
Jephson, and Nelson, the surviving ofllcers of his 
expedition, were with him on the platform. 

The little religion that our Zanzibaris knew, said 
Stanley, was nothing more than legendary lore, and 
in their memories floated dimly a story of a land that 
grew darker and darker as you travelled toward the 
end of the world, and drew nearer to the place where 
a great serpent lay supine, coiled round the whole 
earth. And the ancients must have referred to 
this, where the light is so ghastly, where the woods are 
endless, and are so still and solemn and grey, to this 
oppressive loneliness amid so much life, this loneli- 
ness so chilling to the heart ! And the horror grows 
darker with their fancies, the cold of early morning, 
the comfortless grey of the dawn, the dead white 
mist, the ever-dripping tears of the dew, the deluging 
rains, the appalling thunder-bursts. When night 
comes with its thick, palpable darkness, our Zanzi- 
baris lie cuddled in their little damp huts, they hear 
the tempest, the growling of the winds, the grinding 
of the storm-tossed trees, the fall of granite, the 
shock of the trembling earth, the roaring and rushing 
as of a mad, overwhelming sea — and then the 
horror is intensified. 

It may be, next morning when they hear the shrill 
sounds of the whistle, and the oflScers' voices ring 



210 LONDON DAYS 

out in the dawn, and the blare of the trumpet stirs 
them to preparation and action, that the morbid 
thoughts of the night, and the memories of the terrible 
dreams, will be effaced for a time. But when the 
march has begun once again, and the files are slowly 
moving through the woods, they renew their morbid 
broodings and ask themselves: "How long is it to 
last?" 

They disappear into the woods by twos and threes 
and sixes, and, after the caravan has passed, return 
to the trail, some to reach Yambruja, and upset the 
young officers with their tales of woe, some to stray 
in the dark mazes of the forest, hopelessly lost, some 
to be carved for the cannibal feast. 

Those who remain, committed by fears of greater 
danger, mechanically march on, the prey to dread 
and weakness, the scratch of a thorn, the puncture 
of a pointed cane, the bite of an ant, the sting of a 
wasp. The smallest thing serves to start an ulcer, 
which becomes virulent and eats its way to the bone, 
and the man dies. 

That self-contained man had been the leader in 
that march of death. Weeks, months, years of 
such fighting he had known, fighting not man but 
nature, a foe he could not strike in return. Some- 
times man and his weaknesses aided the enemy, 
jolly black, or surly black fellows packed with 
superstitious fears. The voice of the demagogue 
was loud in England in those days, but not so loud 
as it is in these days. Stanley had been criticised 
harshly for his "treatment of the natives"; they 
were "our black brothers" and all the rest of it; he 
had even been criticised for making expeditions at 
all, since " only by black labour could expeditions go 
forward. What is there in it for the blacks ?" There 



HENRY M. STANLEY 211 

were other mushy-minded objections similar to those 
employed by pacifists in these days. He had his 
own way of hitting back at the mollycoddles. They 
had been asking what he got out of the bold ad- 
venture. That is always the way. He turned to 
Stairs and Parke, Jephson and Nelson, and said 
quietly to his audience ; 

These men were volunteers. What did they "get 
out of it", save the dangers they sought, the sport 
which perhaps they found, such contribution to 
general and special knowledge as they might make, 
and their consciousness of duty performed? They 
are English gentlemen. Two of them are officers 
in the British Army. Mr. Jephson paid a thousand 
pounds for the privilege of accompanying the ex- 
pedition. Captain Nelson left a comfortable home 
and the luxiu*ies of civilised life for the sole purpose 
of joining in the rescue of one of Gordon's governors, 
whom the great soldier's untimely fate had left in a 
perilous position in the extreme south of the Soudan. 
These volunteers pledged themselves to be loyal 
and devoted, and I must confess, assuming that I 
am a sufficient judge, being naturally jealous of 
anything that is not downright and real, that they 
have redeemed their pledge in the noblest and com- 
pletest manner. 

Darkest Africa has been to them a fiery furnace, 
a crucible, and a question chamber, which they have 
tried, each of them to the very depths of their 
natures. They have borne every trial to which 
they have been subjected with more than Spartan, 
with old-English fortitude, the fortitude that existed 
before mawkishness and mock sentiment had made 
men maudlin. It is for you who hear me now to do 
your part toward recognising the merits of these 
young gentlemen, or causing them to be recognised 



212 LONDON DAYS 

by those who have the power to dispense awards 
appropriate to noble and thorough and uncalculating 
performance of duty. 

The gossips used to say, as if they took a peculiar 
pleasure in saying it, that Stanley did not recognise 
loyalty in others. But if the remarks just quoted 
were not recognition, and handsome recognition, 
given, as they were, before the most influential 
audience that could have been assembled in London, 
I do not know what recognition could possibly be. 

Of all my memories of Stanley, the most amusing 
relates to the "American Dinner" given in London 
in his honour. It was not so amusing at the time, 
because that was a time of mishap and muddle. 
Apart from the fact that the name of America should 
be associated, not allied as Mr. Wilson would in- 
sist, with a mismanagement which seemed especially 
determined to prove false the tradition that Ameri- 
cans have a natural and trained capacity for getting 
things done, the thing was a roaring farce. There 
was a "Committee", of course, but the Committee 
had nothing to do with the arrangements. There 
were forty "Honorary Stewards", but I can vouch 
for the fact that the honorary stewards had nothing 
to do with the arrangements. I was one of the forty. 
The ebullient zeal of one man who undertook to do 
everything, and who welcomed the responsibility, 
because he was a friend of Stanley, was responsible 
for the general wreckage of the elaborate plans which 
promised a dinner of ceremony and resulted in an 
informal collation. I have always supposed that 
the kindly gentleman who undertook the whole 



HENRY M. STANLEY 213 

thing, and who was really one of the best fellows 
going, must have paid a good share of the cost of 
this entertainment to his friend Stanley, and in- 
sisted, therefore, upon having his own way, or the 
members of the Committee must have shirked their 
duties, which is n't likely, considering who they 
were. 

Well, here was an American dinner to Stanley. 
There were sixteen speeches, save the mark ! And 
eleven of the speakers were Englishmen, There 
must have been at least three hundred and fifty 
men at the dinner, and fully one half of them, 
possibly more, were not Americans. Not an Ameri- 
can dish was served, and the caterers, whoever 
they were, did not serve the first course until an 
hour and a half, or something like that, after the 
dinner should have begun. 

There was no one to receive the company. The 
chairman was there, but most of the guests arrived 
before he did. There was no reception committee. 
The honorary stewards had no badges or other marks 
to distinguish them from anybody else, and no 
searcher for a guide or for information knew who 
they were. There was no table plan, no list of 
guests. Nobody knew where he was to sit, or who 
would be his neighbours. We heard that the 
printer's forms had collapsed into horrible *'pi" 
just at the point of going to press. Although, as an 
"honorary steward", I arrived a quarter of an hour 
before the time announced, I could find on the 
premises none of my companion honoraries, nor was 
any list of them available. I was talking with two 



214 LONDON DAYS 

or three arrivals when a familiar voice behind me 
asked : "Are we alone in Africa?" 

"It looks like it, Mr. Stanley," said I. "I can't 
find the huts, or the bones of the feast, or the chief 
of the tribe. But you have come to the rescue, as 
usual." 

Stanley looked amused. "Where's our friend 
? Have you seen him ? " he asked. 

I explained what I had heard about the dear 
fellow's dilemmas, and the little that I understood 
of them. 

"Then we '11 have to work our passage," Stanley 
said. "Will it be all right if I stand here.? I'll 
have to meet everybody, I suppose. They won't 
fear I '11 bite 'em, will they, if there 's no manager 
to keep me tied up ? " 

And so it was to Stanley's good sense and his 
willingness to enter into the spirit of the thing that 
the affair got under weigh. But it was a long time 
in arriving anywhere. I saw Whistler put his head 
in at the door. I went after him and introduced 
him to Stanley. "I say," said Whistler to me, "are 
you stewarding ? I 'm a steward, too. It 's all stew, 
is n't it ? But I don't know what to do, do you ? 
Is there anything to eat ? " 

"Not yet," said I. 

"B-r-r-r-r-h ! What 's that?" It sounded like a 
crash of china in an adjoining room. 

"The end of all things, I should think," said 
Stanley. "I say, there's the Duke! No Com- 
mittee? Well, I '11 receive him." 

"The Duke" was the Duke of Teck, the father 



HENRY M. STANLEY 215 

of the present Queen. In a minute he was followed 
by another Duke, Sutherland. And there were 
Stanley's chief officers, who were to share with him 
the honours of the evening. And very soon the 
rooms were filled. But nobody in authority ap- 
peared, or if appearing, no authority was exercised. 
For an hour and a half everybody stood about, 
accumulating hunger and getting very tired. And 
there was no one to say what was to be done, or 
when, or how. 

At last somebody cried: "Gentlemen, dinner 
is served. This way, please, and sit where you 
like!" 

We all cheered at this. 

And so the royalties, and the guests of honour, 
and the orators of the evening followed the hungriest 
men who were nearest the doors, walked rapidly 
into the dining room, and took the first seats they 
could find. The affair had become a picnic. But 
there was a meal. That was the important thing. 
After famishing so long, we had a dinner of sorts. 
But there were sixteen speeches to follow ! This 
fact we learned from the souvenir albums which we 
found at our plates. In the course of time the 
speeches began. 

One of them issued, poured, from a New York 
lawyer who stood in a far corner, waving his arms 
and displaying vast expanses of shirt-cuff. He 
spread-eagled, he made the eagle scream, he Gods- 
countried till you could hear the corn grow. Noth- 
ing could stop him. He ran on till he ran down. 
And then the Grenadier Guards Band, Dan Godfrey 



216 LONDON DAYS 

conducting, struck up the "Star Spangled Banner." 
That was another relief. 

The American dinner to Stanley was given in 
the Portman Rooms in Baker Street. The Portman 
Rooms had formerly housed Madame Tussaud's 
Waxworks. Perhaps the hall in which we dined 
had been the Chamber of Horrors. I suspect it. 
At any rate, there was a general air of wonderment 
as to what might happen next. We would have liked 
the affair more if the Committee, or the Manager of 
All Things, had given less of his useful attention 
to souvenir albums and elaborate trophies, and more 
attention to the details of the evening. Some one 
had designed a large, costly, and elaborate silver 
shield, on which were to be depicted events in Stan- 
ley's career. It was to be presented with a flourish 
of trumpets, that is to say, a speech by the Consul- 
General. But the shield was unfinished, although 
on the spot, and some of the flourishes had to be 
omitted. If the table plans were omitted, some- 
body had managed to get up a list of guests, at the 
last minute. But that was incomplete, too. In 
that dim English way which robs men of their first 
names and puts them down with a single initial, 
even Cumberland, the mind reader, who was present, 
could not have guessed, without seeing him, that 
"H. Hunt" was Holman-Hunt, and not Helen, or 
Henry; that "H. White" was Henry White, the 
secretary of our Legation, and later Ambassador at 
Rome and Paris, still later the unabashed deliverer 
of a pro-German speech, and in the Wilsonic course 
of events, a member of the American Delegation 



HENRY M. STANLEY 217 

to the "Peace Conference" of 1918-1919. But so 
many names were disguised by the poverty of labour 
which denied them all connection with their owners 
that I must now deny them space on this page. 
I remember that "B. Harte" was Bret Harte, that 
*'E. Gosse" meant Edmund Gosse, and I remember 
that "Prof. John S. Hopkins of Gilman University", 
as he appeared in the newspapers of the following 
morning, was really Professor Gilman of Johns 
Hopkins University. To this day the Briton per- 
sists in printing the name of that university "John S. 
Hopkins." 

We wished to hear the speeches of Stanley and 
his oflScers, or, say, the remarks these gentlemen 
might make. Not a button did any one care for 
the other speeches, and the less we cared, the more 
they lapsed into oratory. We knew that Stanley 
and his men would give us plain talk over our cigars, 
and that is what they did. Some of Stanley's talk 
that night I can quote from a report that was made 
at the time. Did I give the date ? It was May 30, 
1890. 

On a wintry afternoon, in 1867, just twenty -three 
years ago, I started from America for Africa, at the 
imperial command of one of the dollar-powers of 
America. I was as ignorant as a babe of the land 
I was going to. As I look back upon my stock of 
resources I am not unmindful that none could be 
poorer in what was fitting and necessary, but I 
possessed some natural store of good will, fondness for 
work, and a wholesome respect for the boss, the 
employer — the paying power. I learned down 
south what they mean by the saying "Root hog, 



218 LONDON DAYS 

or die !" They mean if you don't work, you shan't 
eat. It 's another form of the scriptural saying : 
"In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy 
bread." In the America of my time they under- 
stood that. 

In Abyssinia I acquired several lessons from 
English journalists, the most important being what 
chaff is, and the second — that black trousers in 
the daytime are not suitable. I learned, also, to 
distinguish good soldiers from bad, what kind of 
men made the best officers. ... It takes longer to 
know an Englishman than to know any other 
Christian, or any pagan, that I ever came across. 
He does n't walk up to you, as the Yankee does, 
and pester you with questions about your private 
business and your conjugal experiences. He looks 
at you as if he did not care whether you lived or 
died, starved or rotted. Yet if you do him a little 
service, he is so grateful that he will remember it. 
Not effusive, like a Frenchman, nor gushing like a 
German, he does not regard you superciliously, as 
a Madrileno would, or look upon you as legitimate 
prey, as is the custom of the Greeks ; but he has the 
knack of assuming a profound indifference to your 
existence. 

I was sent to Spain to study Spanish war and 
politics. I discovered a defect, and I doubt greatly 
whether the Spanish leaders have yet become 
conscious of that defect. They could not execute 
the laws. They lacked the courage to do so. There- 
fore, the Republic, which could be sustained only by 
justice, was impossible. 

It was necessary for me to wander further afield, 
to view cities and men, great works, great assemblies, 
many countries — Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, 
Russia, Persia, India, and then, after being well 
seasoned with experience, I entered Africa as a 
leader of men. According to the rules I was not 



HENRY M. STANLEY 219 

ripe, judging by what I now know and what less 
I knew then. I was still young and very rash, head- 
strong, I relied too much on force. Fortunately 
fate was propitious, I was not prematurely cut off. 

Marching eighteen hundred miles into Africa, I 
had time to think. It was reflection I needed. Yet 
I was a dull pupil, and my blood was like molten 
lava. I must admit that while with Livingstone I 
saw no good in the lands I travelled through. The 
negro was precisely what he ought to be — a born 
pagan, a most unloving and unlovable savage. 
Nevertheless, much of what Livingstone expounded 
was unanswerable. I attempted to parry what he 
said by lavish abuse of the natives and their country. 

In 1873 I was back again in Africa, on the opposite 
side of Africa, and after the brief Ashantee campaign, 
returned with a few more experiences. 

The beginning of my real African education was 
in 1875 while sailing along the shores of the greatest 
lake in Africa. It came like a revelation to me. 

Now I have shown you what a dull, slow, student 
I was. You can well understand how lightly the 
abuse and chaff of my brother journalists sit on 
my mind. For there were even duller and slower 
folk than I. It is not one lecture, or one speech, or 
even a hundred, that will suffice to infuse a knowledge 
of the value of Africa into the English mind. It 
took ten years for people to believe thoroughly that 
I did find Livingstone ! 

Only a few days ago one of the most prominent 
men in England said: "I do not know what you 
have been doing lately in Africa, Mr. Stanley, but 
if you are to lecture I will gladly go to hear you." 
And so I say that although in this assembly we may 
know what is going on in Africa, we must not suppose 
that the British public, or the journalism which is 
its reflection, is any wiser to-day than in the time of 
Mungo Park. 



220 LONDON DAYS 

Rather neat scoring, I think. The world does not 
change much. 

Stanley married and went into Parliament. One 
day I thought it might be interesting to see him try 
conclusions with an election crowd in London. He 
was contesting on the Surrey side of the river. I 
think it was in Lambeth. He got a new experience. 
The crowd heckled him, and tried to shout him 
down, just for the mere joy of living. But they 
could n't silence him. While they bellowed, he 
would stand calmly and look at them. After some 
minutes of this kind of thing, he managed to be 
heard. 

" Is this my meeting or yours ? " he asked. They 
were quite certain the meeting was their own. The 
interruptions were numerous. I was thinking what 
he would do with a mutinous lot in Darkest Africa, 
and presently he told them that the savages compared 
pretty favourably with "their white brothers in 
London"! The crowd yelled, but they couldn't 
disconcert him. He finished his speech ; cut it 
short, no doubt, but did n't appear to do so. Only 
the persons near him could hear what he said, there 
was so much noise. As he left the meeting, the 
gentle souls began to throw things. I saw them 
trying to overturn his carriage. His wife was in it ! 

Stones flew. But Stanley lived to fight again. 
Knowing him, I think I know how angry he really 
was. 

"But," said he when we met again, "I longed for 
a few seconds of Africa ! My education is n't com- 
pleted yet. I am learning about British electioneer- 



HENRY M. STANLEY 221 

ing crowds. When they shout: 'Fair play, fair 
play', they mean 'Fair play for our side.' Come 
now, that 's a fact." 

It is unnecessary that I should incriminate myself. 

I never could see what satisfaction Stanley got 
from being a member of Parliament. In his heart 
he would have been glad, once or twice, to lead them 
all. Government and Opposition and their followers, 
into an African jungle — and lose them. 

I see I have not mentioned that he became Sir 
Henry. But I knew him as Mr. 



CHAPTER XV 

GEORGE MEREDITH 

A BRIGHT, warm, summer morning. I was work- 
ing under pressure in my study in Cheyne Walk on 
an article which had to be finished that afternoon. 
Saturdays were my busiest days and this was Satur- 
day, and only morning. The maid rapped at the 
study door and said, "Mr. John Burns to see you, 
Sir." 

In came Burns, preceded by his great voice and 
hearty laugh, making apology for interruption. 
"Can you drop the work and come with me.f^" said 
he. 

"Impossible," said I. "Sorry, but — - " 

"Well, I 'm off to George Meredith's," said he, 
laying a post card on my writing table. The post 
card was from Meredith, who appointed the meeting, 
and added : 

"We '11 have a fine Radical day. Bring your 
friend." 

"You are the friend," said Burns. 

"I '11 come," said I. "Give me a quarter of an 
hour, and I '11 finish this article somehow." And 
so I made sacrifice to one of my gods, the god that 
dwelt on the sunny slope of Box Hill. The article 



GEORGE MEREDITH 223 

was brought to a quicker turn than it had dreamed 
of, a hansom was called ; we rushed to Clapham 
Junction and took train for Burford Bridge. 

It was more than a quarter of a century ago, but 
it seems like yesterday. And yet, though it was 
more than a quarter of a century ago, the Great 
Dock Strike had seemed so long before that it was 
almost forgotten. In the dock strike, that is to 
say, in 1889, I had made John Burns' acquaintance. 
He says I "discovered" him, discovered the real 
John Burns under the red-hot agitator who was 
expected to lead a hundred thousand men to in- 
cendiarism and the sack of London. 

I do not remember the year which brought this 
Meredith day to our spinning world. But it must 
have been in the early nineties, and Burns on the 
London County Council, and perhaps for a session 
or so a member of Parliament. The date, however, 
does n't matter. If it were not 1892 it may have 
been 1893 or '94. Let 's get on. 

Neither Burns nor I had ever met George Mere- 
dith. Burns and he had had some correspondence 
which resulted in the post card and our expedition 
to Box Hill that blossomy, fragrant morning when 
the England of dreams lay all about us, and the 
stream that ran by Burford Bridge "babbled o' 
green fields" and played with flowers. 

We arrived at the little station in Surrey about 
noon. Whatever it may be now, it was then a little 
station. We strode off to Box Hill, and turned a 
corner, and there, trapping the sunshine, was Flint 
Cottage, George Meredith's home, at the bottom of 



224 LONDON DAYS 

a sloping garden running over with roses. Roses, 
roses everywhere, and higher in the sloping garden, 
overlooking a valley that the gods had made for 
poets to dream in, was a little chalet where Meredith 
wrote, and slept, and had the muses to wait on him. 
To the chalet a gardener directed us when we asked 
for his master. We climbed the path. The chalet 
door stood partly open. Burns knocked on a rose 
trellis. "Come in!" cried a voice. In we went. 
There was George Meredith, in a Morris chair, with 
a rug over his knees, and sheets and sheets and 
sheets of manuscript over the rug. If he were to 
rise, the whole mountain of paper would tumble 
helter-skelter to the floor. 

"No! don't move," said my companion. "I'm 
John Burns." Then he introduced me. 

"I knew you, John Burns, I knew you. Your 
photographs are like you. The voice is what I 
imagined it would be. Sit, gentlemen, sit. There, 
by the window. No better view in England, I 
really think. I comfort myself with it. It is good 
enough for parliament-men and our scribbling kind," 
said Meredith, smiling roguishly at me. The grasp 
of his hand was firm and generous. His voice had 
rich, deep tones. But he looked a fragile being. 

"Like the schoolboy, I can say, 'This is n't writin', 
it 's readin',' " and he pointed to the manuscript. 

"Chapman and Hall-ing," I ventured to say. 

"That 's right," said Meredith, "you see the slave 
bearing his burden." 

If John Burns' photographs were faithful, so were 
Meredith's, or so was the one with which I had been 



GEORGE MEREDITH 225 

familiar. His beard and hair were grey, almost 
white then. He looked older than he was. He was 
only sixty-five. Only sixty-five, and I thought him 
old ! He lived to be eighty-one. I liked his voice. 
I had been told that it was high and shrill. It was 
nothing of the kind. It was mellow, clear, and his 
speech was scholar-like, with quaint shafts of wit. 
They used to tell of his "artificial talk." I heard 
none of it. He was as natural as his roses. But 
there might be prickly thorns under the rose. 

Meredith gathered his papers and put them aside. 
He leaned back in his big, comfortable chair, and 
said "now let 's talk" as another man might say 
"let 's have a drink." And we three sat, and talked 
and remade the world like a lot of youngsters. We 
knew better, each of us, knew that the dreams we 
were indulging would never be realised, that prob- 
ably we would never call them up and look at them 
again — we would n't dare — they would be buried 
with us, no doubt. Some other youngsters might 
dream similar dreams by and by. No doubt they 
would. But to-day was to-day. And to-morrow 
I would be twice as old as Meredith, though half 
his years, and know in all my body half as much as 
his little finger knew. That very day he was the 
youngest of the three. He bubbled quietly, like 
champagne in a hollow-stemmed glass. The con- 
versation capered. We might have been lads out 
of school, and we ragged the authorities. Meredith 
was the youngest and gayest of the three. Burns 
the most enthusiastic, and I came dragging on with 
not exactly timorous whoop-hurrahs ! And it was 



226 LONDON DAYS 

June, and high noon, with roses everywhere, and 
still more roses, and the humming of bees. And the 
big world was far away — a million miles. 

It was " a fine Radical day " no doubt, in more than 
the limited political sense. Burns was the only 
political Radical of the three. He called me "a 
crusted Tory." I don't remember what he called 
George Meredith, who left us guessing, I think, as 
some of his printed pages were likely to do. Any- 
way, we did n't talk books. Life was better. And 
there was a lot of life to talk about yet, at the end 
of an age. Besides, our host was pressing us to stay 
to luncheon. 

Down the garden path we strolled, still talking. 
Meredith said, as we seated ourselves at table : 
*'I 'm here alone at present : you come like a rescuing 
expedition. This talk is a shower on parched land." 
After luncheon the talk went on, under trees, and 
tea-time had come before we knew it. After tea a 
walk over Box Hill. 

You will have gathered by this time that the talk- 
ing was not about Meredith or his books. He 
guided us from those high pastures where we would 
have liked to browse to the lower marshes where 
we might stumble as we pleased over politics. 
Home Rule and no rule, free trade and protection, 
dear food and cheap food, municipal administration, 
the housing of the poor, socialism, and all those 
everlasting puzzles which England is discussing now 
as she discussed them thirty years ago. They were 
very dear to John Burns. They seemed interesting 
to Meredith. He enjoyed talking another man's 



GEORGE MEREDITH 227 

shop ; at any rate, he enjoyed talking Burns' shop 
so much that the talk scarcely touched on books. 
It may be mentioned at this point that John Burns, 
even at that time, owned probably more books than 
Meredith, and knew the insides of them. Whether 
or not he knew the insides of more books than did 
Meredith is another matter. Meredith, you know, 
was a publisher's reader. 

I did manage, while we were at tea, to get in a 
word about "One of Our Conquerors" and its tribute 
to good wine, certain passages which could have 
been written only by a connoisseur. 

"Ah, I 'm that; yes, I 'm that ! Burns would n't 
appreciate that, but you do." And I spoke of a 
certain description in the same book, a view from 
London Bridge, westward, in the late afternoon. 
And the man chasing his hat in a high wind. I said 
I had taken an American friend there recently, and 
he had had to chase his hat, and then, for solace, we 
had gone to the restaurant in the city, the one 
described by Meredith, and had had food, and 
cracked a bottle of the delicate wine which, with 
tender ritual, had been opened and served to the 
two men in the story. 

"And," said I, "although you disguised the 
restaurant and the label, I will not disguise from 
you the fact that my friend is also a connoisseur of 
the bright and beautiful, the American celebrator of 
choice things and moments — Thomas Bailey Al- 
drich — and that he rose at a point in our simple 
feast and said, with reverence : ' I salute George 
Meredith.'" 



228 LONDON DAYS 

Meredith's eyes twinkled. He rose, lifted his 
straw hat, bowed, and said : " The Author of 
'Marjorie Daw', I am your obliged and humble 
servant." 

And so the honours were even between Aldrich 
and himself. 

Burns put in his word here. "We must go for 
the five-thirty train. Good-bye, Mr. Meredith, we 
have had the — " 

"No, no, John Burns ! It 's not to be heard of ! 
Both of you are to stay for dinner ! Mark you that, 
John Burns. Never, never shall I forgive you two 
if you leave a poor lone man of ink without dining 
at his table. The thing is forbidden, forbidden 
absolutely, John Burns." 

Is it strange then that we stayed for dinner, hav- 
ing already taken luncheon, tea, and a stroll with 
the magician of Box Hill ? Not only did we stay, 
but we stayed till nearly midnight, having just time 
to catch the last train for London. 

And this is a very pleasant part of my recollections 
of the day : 

Our host, when he had shown us to the dining 
room, excused himself for a moment, lighted a candle, 
and, opening a door in a corner of the room, de- 
scended to the cellar. In two or three minutes he 
reappeared, his delicate face lighted by the candle 
which he held in his left hand directly behind a 
dusty half-bottle of wine, through which the light 
shone softly in a ruby glow. One saw first the wine, 
then the light, then the face, as ascending the stairs 
they entered from below, mounting slowly with 



GEORGE MEREDITH 229 

exquisite care lest the wine be shaken. Slowly, and 
with great care, Meredith wrapped a napkin around 
the bottle, and drew the cork, placing the bottle 
at my plate and saying, with the most gracious, 
old-world courtesy: "For one who knows and 
appreciates, from one who appreciates and knows." 

There was " approbation from Sir Hubert 
Stanley ! " 

"John Burns is a teetotaller, they say," added 
Meredith. "Of such is not the kingdom of my 
heaven. Burns says you discovered him. What do 
you think of your discovery ? Tell me how it came 
about." 

"Burns does not embody my idea of a modest 
man," said I. "As for that, there seems to be some 
doubt, nowadays, whether modest men should be 
permitted to live. What does Gilbert say : 

***You must stir it, and stump it 
And blow your own trumpet, 
Or, bless me, you have n't a chance !* 

"Well, I came upon Burns first, in '89, when he 
had London scared (of course London would n't 
confess that it was scared but it was) and he was 
'stumping it' at the dock gates, and from cart- 
tails on Tower Hill, and was listened to by thou- 
sands and tens of thousands of hungry men, and 
their wives, and youngsters — " 

"'Agitating the dregs of London', the newspapers 
put it," said Meredith. 

"All for sixpence an hour," said Burns. 

"You have the floor !" said Meredith to me. 



230 LONDON DAYS 

"I told you he is not accurately described as a 
modest man. This is my story," I continued, "the 
story as I see it. London had heard of him — when 
was it ^ — in '86, or so, when he led a crowd of East 
Enders to Trafalgar Square where mass meetings 
were not permitted, and the crowd got out of hand 
and smashed plate-glass windows, and Burns got 
his head broken, or nearly so, and went to gaol." 

"'Serve the brute right !' I remember the run of 
thoughtful British opinion," put in Meredith. 

"I was not in England at the time, but I remem- 
ber the verdict," I said. 

"The trouble was," said Burns, "I hadn't been 
introduced to the authorities. There I touched 
a fundamental British prejudice. The affair se- 
cured me the introduction, and opened Trafalgar 
Square — " 

"To the mob," said Meredith. 

"To mass meetings," said Burns. 

"7 am playing British chorus," was Meredith*s 
rejoinder. 

"Second chapter," said I. "There came the year 
of the Great Dock Strike. The casual labourer 
swarmed out of chaos, and struck for a sane, not to 
say 'civilised' method of hiring, and sixpence an 
hour." 

"And the dock companies, or whatever they were, 
were not sane, and, also, they had n't a sixpence, 
they said" — thus Meredith. 

"Which was absurd, Mr. Meredith, as you are 
on the point of adding," I went on. "We don't 
know how many thousands of men were thrown out 



GEORGE MEREDITH 231 

of work. Nobody knows to this day, but here is 
what I am coming at ; there were thousands of them, 
and there was great suffering in their famihes. Well, 
when I first saw Burns he was organising kitchens, 
and feeding women and children, and making ten 
speeches every twenty-four hours, and sleeping an 
hour or two when he could find time and a place to 
lie down. Some nights he did not sleep at all. The 
night before I met him he slept four hours in his 
clothes and boots. In three days he made thirty-six 
speeches ; in three weeks he averaged ten speeches 
a day, out of doors. He is hoarse still, no wonder. 

"I lost sight of him for a bit, and found him 
again on Tower Hill, speaking to a big crowd. His 
platform was a dray. When he stopped speaking 
and jumped down from the dray, I introduced my- 
self to him, said I was mightily interested, and that 
I wanted to interview him. 

*"A11 right,' said he ; 'begin !' 

"If he were not modest, I was. 'Not here,' said 
I, 'let 's go where we can talk in quiet.' So I tucked 
him into a hansom and, followed by a yelling crowd 
which we soon left out of sight, we drove to a club 
of mine in the West End, where we had a long talk. 
The immediate results were — oh, well, some articles 
in which I tried to show the world the real John 
Burns." 

"That was the discovery.?" asked Meredith. 

"Burns calls it so. He was no more modest about 
being discovered then than he is now. He has a 
way of telling you straight what he thinks, or what 
he 's at, or of telling you that he won't tell you." 



232 LONDON DAYS 

"I *ve noticed that. John Burns, are you under 
any delusions about popularity? I think you are 
not." 

"I 'm not," said Burns. "When the crowds are 
cheering their loudest, I am asking myself how soon 
they will hang my carcass on the outer walls." 

"A cheering and useful inquiry," observed Mere- 
dith. *' My impression is that you have a long course 
to cover. But leaders of the people are wisest when 
they remember that there are outer walls for the 
hanging of carcasses." 

"The confessions of Radicals strengthen the soul," 
said I. 

"These are not confessions; they are articles of 
faith," exclaimed Burns. 

I intimated that my faith in a political sense was 
as a grain of mustard seed, human nature being what 
it was, and political stupidity unconquerable. Glad- 
stone being mentioned by our host, I asked Burns 
to tell his Gladstone story, that is, what the G. O. M. 
said to him, and what he said to the G. O. M. at 
their first meeting. 

"It was in the lobby of the House of Commons," 
Burns explained, "soon after my election. You 
know I was not what might be called a worshipper 
of that wonderful man. A bit too independent for 
his liking, perhaps." 

"And the only thing he would dislike, perhaps," 
said Meredith, smiling. 

"Well, you know. I was in the lobby, talking 
with a front-bench Liberal when the great man 
passed. The member with whom I was talking 



GEORGE MEREDITH 233 

took me up to him and presented me. The G. O. M. 
bowed, and we shook hands. He said: 

*"It gives me pleasure, Mr. Burns, to see you 
here, to welcome you to the House of Commons.' 

"I replied, 'Believe me, sir, my pleasure is equal 
to your own ! ' " 

"A hit, a palpable hit !" cried Meredith. "I can 
see Gladstone drawing in his horns." 

" He stiffened a bit, and we went our ways. That 
is all there is of the story," added Burns. 

"The one about the docker and the matches is 
not bad," said I. 

"Let me have it," begged Meredith. 

"At one of my meetings near the dock gates, a 
fellow shouted: 'Burn the docks; break in and 
burn the docks ! ' He interrupted me two or three 
times with that cry. The crowd was sullen. It 
had n't got its sixpence yet. I must stop the roaring 
fellow, or his mates might get out of control. I 
borrowed a box of matches from the nearest man. 
'Catch!' I cried to the noisy chap. He caught it 
as I flung it over the heads of the crowd. 'Now, 
then,' I called to him, 'if you are crazy, if you don't 
care what happens to all these men and their wives 
and children, and if you want to ruin this strike, 
go, fire the docks!' But the man didn't move. I 
waited, but still he did n't move. Then I said : 
* Your hand has n't the courage of your mouth. 
Take the matches from him, men, hand 'em back 
to me. Make way for him. He 's shown that he 's 
a braggin' coward. Out with him!' He skulked 
away, hooted by the crowd. I suppose that was the 



234 LONDON DAYS 

origin of the yarn that I was inciting the mob to 
burn the docks," 

"That 's the way history is written, John Burns. 
Have you found your dockers suspicious regarding 
you?" Meredith put the question with a naive 
air. 

"Of course. Men of their kind are always sus- 
picious, until they know you. Why should n't they 
be.'' Whoever went among 'em before those days 
with any other purpose than to get the best of 'em ?" 

"They suspected your decent clothes," said I. 

Burns laughed. "One morning I appeared in a 
new suit of blue sei'ge like this, and a new straw hat, 
like that. * Where 'd you get 'em, Burns.?' one 
man shouted. 'He 's makin' more 'n sixpence out 
o' us,' yelled another. Then I had to explain, 
anyhow, I did explain, that Madame Tussaud's had 
given me a new suit, so that they could put my old 
one on a wax figure of me. Tussaud's wanted my 
old hat, but my wife would n't part with that. She 
wanted it as a trophy." 

We sat at table all the evening talking, George 
Meredith, John Burns, and I. Of all the men one 
had ever heard talk, I can't remember one who had 
a charm of voice and speech excelling Meredith's. 
I can feel its fascination now across the interval of 
nearly thirty years. It was, I have said, a musical 
voice, but it was more than that. It was rich and 
deep and delicate. The enunciation was perfect 
with a perfection that was rare and individual; 
his voice was an instrument with many banks of 
keys. Charm was its characteristic, charm that no 



GEORGE MEREDITH 235 

one could describe, although many have tried to do 
so. And his eyes, you could say, were bluish-grey, 
or grey-blue, but you could not say — as they 
twinkled, or flashed, or seemed at rest like little 
lakes, pellucid, undisturbed, or lighted instantly as 
some humorous or sympathetic thought moved 
behind them — you could not say how, or why 
they held you, or had the power, a pleasant power, 
of searching you, looking through you. There was 
nothing that you could describe in so many words, 
but there was much that you could feel and like. 
Even when Meredith spoke of man, or woman, or 
deed that he did not like, and spoke with dramatic 
force, his gaze would not blaze or harden. He 
seemed to be searching serenely beyond the surface 
for the element of comedy, searching with sympathy 
and humour for the thing that he could understand, 
and understand better than any one else in the 
world. You could always touch him with a sympa- 
thetic humour. He did not like wise owls, or rather 
the owlishness which the run of humans take for 
wisdom. 

His strength, George Meredith's strength, was in 
his perceptions, his appreciations ; physically he was 
frail, or was frail then ! You would n't have sup- 
posed him ever to have been a great walker and a 
man of athletic tendencies. But he had been. Now 
he walked rather slowly, with a stick, and seemed 
glad to stop every few minutes. His face made me 
think of a cameo, by the delicacy of its carving. 
There was exquisite beauty in it, and the voice 
enhanced that. But even the most delicate lines 



236 LONDON DAYS 

were firmly carved. If you handled him roughly 
you might bend him, but you could not break his 
spirit. At the time I speak of, he was beyond his 
years, far beyond them ; physically, but in no other 
way, he seemed an old and fragile man. And yet 
neither voice nor eyes suggested anything of the 
kind. In spirits and outlook he retained the keen- 
ness of mighty youth. When he talked with us he 
was of no age at all, the agelessness of the eternal ; 
it was only when he walked with us about his garden, 
or over Box Hill, that the flesh betrayed, now and 
then, its limitations. If you had had his eyes, you 
might have looked through his body. A strong 
wind might have carried him away. But he lived 
sixteen years after that, and, for all his touch of 
melancholy, they were happy years. 

Others could tell other tales of him and have done 
so ; have said, for one thing, that he was quick and 
tempery. What they meant was that his highly 
sensitive make-up had n't its times or seasons, but 
were on and off quite unexpectedly, as is usually the 
case with highly sensitive folk. Men do not study 
such sensitive creatures with the object of avoiding 
trouble ; they blunder and thunder on and then are 
amazed, when they have struck a nerve centre, to 
find that it has its own method of reacting. And 
then George Meredith had been more than half his 
life a reader for publishers. And all his life he was 
writing poetry and novels ! Now if there is any act 
less likely than another to insure peace of mind, it 
is the reading of other persons' manuscripts. And 
to do that regularly, professionally, for several 



GEORGE MEREDITH 237 

decades, while you prefer to be a poet and love to 
be a novelist, is to give oneself to occupations which 
not only jar upon each other, but upon the nerves 
of him that undertakes the triple task. Meredith 
must have had a rare power of concentration to 
preserve his own authorship from saturation in the 
flood of manuscripts in which he swam for forty 
years. His experiences would have paralysed the 
creative capacity in most men. 

I can suppose only that they who found his talk 
"artificial" must have touched some spring in him 
that Burns and I did not press. We found him 
entirely free from artificiality. No pair of strangers 
could have been more agreeably entertained. And 
yet we inflicted upon him a long day. They say he 
was "gey ill to live wi'." Perhaps he was; perhaps 
he was not. But why should n't he have been ? 
Most writers are. And why should n't they be ? 
They are of a sensitive sort, in greater degree, or 
less. Their business is mainly to observe, to con- 
sider, to speak with ink. These things require con- 
centration of mind. And while the world is running 
in and out, and kindly intentioned persons are 
making suggestions which have no "relation to the 
business in hand, or wondering why their wish can- 
not have precedence, or why their opinion is not the 
most important thing in the universe, the poet's 
work, or train of thought, has to get on, or the 
novelist's, or the reader of manuscripts'. It may 
be true that no creative gentleman has a right to 
moods, but at least he has a right to tenses. No 
such plea is put forth for the rest of mankind. 



238 LONDON DAYS 

Probably the fact is that the person criticising con- 
siders his own mood the more important of the two. 
Artistic sensibilities are as difficult for their posses- 
sors to endure all the time as they can possibly be 
for any one else to encounter a part of the time. 
But who ever thinks of that ? 

We talked on through the evening, without leav- 
ing the dining room. I caught Burns looking ap- 
prehensively at the clock. "Yes," said I, "we can 
catch it if we go at once. It 's the last train." 
There was a hurried leave-taking, and we were off. 
We left the kind old gentleman standing in the 
doorway, holding a lamp which lighted us down the 
path and shone full upon his face. 

"Well.^^" said Burns, when we were seated in the 
train. 

"A glorious day !" I answered. 

"Never a better," said Burns. 

Surely we never went through a better day together, 
and we went through many. 

Late one afternoon in 1907, I was crossing the 
outer lobby of the House of Commons just as John 
Burns was crossing it in the opposite direction. He 
saw me first and called out to me. 

"Where have you come from now?" he asked, 
when we had shaken hands. "And how long is it 
since we met.'*" 

"America this time," said I. "I Ve been there 
four years. But it must be seven years since I 've 
seen you." 

"Gadabout!" said he. "Did you ever have 
another Meredith day ? " 



GEORGE MEREDITH 239 

"No," said I, "nor anything like it. Let 's go 
again." 

"Let 's," was his response. 

But we did not go again, for, as it turned out, 
another ten days called me back to America. Burns, 
of course, was already in the Cabinet, but he wore a 
blue serge suit, just as of yore. 

In 1913 when again I came to England, I did not 
see him. I had several months in the country but 
only ten days in town, when I fled with an attentive 
influenza which Freshwater drove away. 

But in 1916, having come the day before from a 
liner at Liverpool, I was walking in Victoria Street 
just as Burns turned a corner. 

"The oddest thing," said he. "I was just think- 
ing of our day with Meredith. Let 's talk. But 
don't talk politics. Which way are you going?" 

"Any way," I said. And we strolled into the 
cloisters of Westminster Abbey. 



CHAPTER XVI 

PARNELL 

The man most talked of in '88-'90 was not Mr. 
Gladstone but Mr. Parnell. The Parnell Com- 
mission "had shaken the earth", as an Irish writer 
said in a moment of unusual restraint. And dur- 
ing its long-drawn life, as during the events which 
immediately had preceded it, "the uncrowned 
king of Ireland" was the foremost topic of conver- 
sation and of newspaper attention. From the 
ordeal of the Commission he emerged with triumph, 
a triumph which in its turn caused some planetary 
commotion, only to be met with the divorce suit 
of Captain O'Shea, and the subsequent storms, and 
snarls, and hopeless desertions of Committee Room 
Fifteen. Thence to heartbreak and death was but 
a short and rapid decline. 

I knew Parnell but slightly ; no one knew him 
well. Lord Salisbury did not know him at all, 
had never taken the trouble to cross the lobbies 
between the Houses of Lords and Commons and 
look at him or listen to him. "I have never seen 
him," said Mr. Gladstone's rival. And it was 
common report that the men who knew Parnell 
least of all, and least of all about him, were his own 



PARNELL 241 

followers. Even that is possible, if it seems unlikely. 
One of his most conspicuous followers, who wrote 
conspicuously and talked about him and about 
Home Rule, I knew very well, and for years I 
wondered if he really knew as little as he said he 
did about his chief's ways and work and wisdom. 
He made a great mystery of them, as many of 
the Irish members did, or pretended to do. They 
told you that he kept them at arm's length, 
scarcely nodded to them, or, if he nodded, did so 
in a manner that was cold and distant beyond belief. 
They were the dust beneath his feet. But they 
told you that they did not resent this treatment; 
it showed the superiority of the man. 

Whether they resented it or not, you may form 
your own opinion by what they did to him when they 
got the chance. But before the squalls and gales 
arose in Committee Room Fifteen, he had held them 
together; they were a disciplined body. No man 
before his day had been able to hold them together, 
to discipline them, to force his will upon them. 
No other parliamentary leader of the Irish before 
him produced results. But he produced them. 
His followers feared him, and they feared him be- 
cause he was so unlike themselves, so un-Irish. 
His "mystery" lay in his immense capacity for 
holding his tongue ; in his aloofness ; in his concen- 
tration. He knew how to get from the rest of the 
United Kingdom, from the English and Scotch and 
so on, what he wanted ; as a rule, his followers 
did not. He knew how to play the political game 
in the British way, with additions of his own ; his 



242 LONDON DAYS 

followers did not. They had not the patience; 
they may have had other qualities more captivating 
than his, but they had not the patience or the art 
of command. 

There was a time when I doubted that he was 
really so elusive as political persons said. And if 
he were so, why.? It could not be for the mere 
pleasure of eluding, or deluding people. There 
would be very little pleasure in that. Well, one day 
my doubt was dispelled. 

Parnell had made an appointment to see me at 
the House of Commons. It was not for the purposes 
of a newspaper interview, for he would not have 
given himself the trouble on that account. It was 
not for any purpose or interest of my own. I had 
conveyed to him a proposal from an American editor. 
It was a proposal which Parnell had not only not 
declined, but which he was considering with some 
favour. I was to meet him again and discuss it 
further. The time and place were of his choos- 
ing. I was punctually there, only to be met with 
the message : " Mr. Parnell is not in the House." 

That may have been technically true, as Mrs. 
A. may be technically "not at home" to Mrs. B. 
But he was somewhere on the premises, because I 
saw him enter them. There were good reasons 
for assuming that the appointment had not slipped 
his mind, or his memoranda. And so I thought 
that the person who told me Parnell was not in the 
House might have invented the reply he gave. He 
knew of the appointment, and, though he did not 
know its purpose, knew that Parnell had wished to 



PARNELL 243 

see me; why, then, should he give a reply which 
might put his Chief in the wrong. But then, why 
had not Parnell sent word or left word, making 
another appointment? He would scarcely have 
declined the proposal from America without the 
courtesy of another meeting. Indeed, he had prom- 
ised that. 

*'Very well," I said, "I will wait." 

But the agreeable gentleman could not assure me 
that Mr. Parnell would be at the House that day. 

"Has he been here?" 

*'I believe so." 

It was too early to go away. Question time was 
not over. I decided to wait. Mr. Parnell's repre- 
sentative withdrew. After a while I thought there 
had been a mistake somewhere. Then I remem- 
bered that the emissary "could not assure" me, etc. 
I thought this odd, in the circumstances, and con- 
cluded not to wait any longer. The affair was 
Parnell's, not mine. But if he had decided to decline 
the proposal concerning which he had invited me to 
call upon him, it was not particularly civil of him to 
take this offhand way of doing so. I left the House 
and went toward the Westminster Bridge station 
of the Underground Railway, just opposite the 
Clock Tower of St. Stephen's. Turning the corner 
by the gates of Palace Yard, I saw Parnell, ahead 
of me, cross the street and enter the railway station. 
He took an eastbound train. I was just in time 
to catch the same train but not to catch him. 

He alighted at the next station. Charing Cross. 
So did I, intent on overtaking him. But there was 



244 LONDON DAYS 

a blocking crowd at the exit stairs where tickets were 
collected, and he was away first. Up Villiers Street 
I followed him to the top at the Strand, where he 
turned into the South Eastern Railway station. 
This was interesting. Why had n't he, I wondered, 
taken the outside stairs that led from Villiers Street 
into the station ? 

"Possibly he has caught sight of me," I thought. 
"Is he trying to elude me? Let 's see." 

He entered the South Eastern station at the 
left-hand door. He left it presently by the door 
on the other side of the cab yard and crossed the 
Strand to the telegraph office, which at that time 
was exactly opposite the cab entrance to the rail- 
way. I withdrew into the tobacconist's pavilion 
at the gate and there awaited Parnell's exit from the 
telegraph office. But he didn't recross the Strand to 
the station. A hansom was passing the telegraph 
office door. Parnell ran out, hailed the cab, entered 
it, and drove eastward along the Strand. I took 
another cab and kept his in sight. His cab was held 
up by a block a little to the west of Wellington 
Street, where a long stream of traffic was crossing 
to Waterloo Bridge. Parnell left his cab in the 
crush and disappeared in the pack of humans and 
vehicles. I left my cab, walked back a short dis- 
tance along the south side of the Strand, and there 
turned down by the Savoy Theatre, lingering a 
little, and then down the steps to the Embankment, 
keeping inside the gardens. My guess was right. 
Parnell passed within a few feet of me. He was 
walking westward. I walked inside the gardens, 



PARNELL 245 

he outside and well in advance. He reached the 
Underground station again, passed through it to 
Villiers Street, walked up Villiers Street to the 
wooden stairs of the South Eastern, while I remained 
at the entrance of the Underground. Then I took 
a cab to my Club in Piccadilly. 

If Parnell thought that he had the best of the 
chase, that he had given me "the slip", he had 
another opinion, probably, when, as he was about 
to enter a suburban train, he was approached by a 
courteous young man who introduced himself as my 
assistant and said how fortunate it was meeting 
like this, because it gave him the opportunity to 
ask if Mr. Parnell would send me the reply which 
he had promised for that day, as I wished to cable 
it to New York. 

"Parnell didn't turn a hair," said my assistant, 
when he reported to me at the Club a few minutes 
later. "If he were surprised, he didn't show it. 
But he narrowed his eyes and said, in a frigid way 
that brought down the temperature of that cold 
station, 'I will write.' And then the train started." 

"And he with it.?" I asked. 

"No. It left both of us on the platform. I bade 
him good afternoon and came here. I suppose he 
took the next train." 

I made no comment, but calling for a cable form, 
wrote on it this message for New York : 

"Parnell declines." 

"But ,he has n't declined," my assistant ex- 
claimed. 



246 LONDON DAYS 

"No, but he will. You can keep that cable mes- 
sage in your pocket until he does." 

The reason I had not followed Parnell into the 
South Eastern station was that in the train from 
Westminster to Charing Cross I had told my assistant 
what to do, and where I thought Parnell was going. 

For Parnell's reply I did n't care one way or 
another. But I thought that I was even with him 
for his evasion of me at the House, of his treatment 
of an appointment which he had made, and of 
a courteous proposal. My method of letting him 
know, without having said so, that I was not entirely 
ignorant of his reasons was, in the circumstances, 
quite legitimate. He could not and did not take 
open exception to it. And for nearly thirty years 
I never mentioned it. I do so now simply to illus- 
trate what I mean by his elusiveness. It may 
interest the few who remember some of his traits. 
It is quite erroneous to suppose, as many souls 
not altogether simple seem to do, that a journalist 
always tells all that he knows. 

But I might throw in here this remark : In all 
that promenade and hide and seek in London streets, 
nobody seemed to recognise Parnell, nobody turned 
to look at him. He was merely a passerby like 
another. Crowds stare, they do not observe. They 
see only what is pointed out to them, what they 
expect to see, — and not always that. 

Two or three days later, in reply to a telegram 
of inquiry, Parnell declined the proposal from 
America. My assistant sent both the inquiry and 
my cable. Concerning the latter, he asked me : 



PARNELL 247 

"What made you certain in advance?" 

"A rule known to astute politicians — 2 and 2 make 
4. It is not altered by Home Rule, or other matters." 

I have often observed, with forty years of oppor- 
tunity for doing so, that few persons know so little 
of conditions in Ireland, of Irish conditions in Parlia- 
ment, of the "Irish movement", whatever that 
may be at any given time, as the Americans, and 
particularly the Irish in America. I have had my 
share of rebuke for mentioning this. An illustra- 
tion will serve. 

During the summer of 1890 I had a few weeks in 
the United States. One evening in Boston I hap- 
pened to meet, as I was passing his office, a man 
whom I knew well, Jeffrey Roche, Editor of The 
Pilot, an Irish paper and the principal organ of 
Roman Catholicism in New England. Roche had 
been the assistant, and later became the successor, 
to the late John Boyle O'Reilly, and like him was a 
delightful and lovable fellow and the writer of charm- 
ing verse. He hated England, of course, and as 
I did not, we had many tilts, in print and out of it, 
but we were always good friends. 

"Hullo, Jeffrey," said I. 

"Hullo, my enemy," said he, laughing as we 
shook hands. 

"Why 'enemy'.?" I asked. "Has poor old Ire- 
land another grievance,'^" 

"You wronged Parnell !" 

"Sit down and tell me about it," said I. 

And we went to dine at the nearest restaurant 
where the dear fellow explained that an article of 



248 LONDON DAYS 

mine, sent from London and published in the 
Boston Herald during the previous February, had 
''scandalised all Irishmen" and "imperilled the 
chances of Home Rule." 

"Dear, dear," said I, "that's a lot for one man 
to do ! How did it happen ?" 

"Your article said that an action for divorce had 
been entered by a Captain O'Shea who named Parnell 
as corespondent." 

"Well, what of it? Everybody knows it." 

"I don't know it. We don't know it here. 
Nobody knows it." 

"And you're an editor, Jeffrey! Is that the 
way you keep the run of the news.'*" 

"Such a case has never been tried." 

"It has not yet been tried, you mean. Of course 
not ; it has to take its turn. It will come on in the 
autumn." 

"Who is O'Shea?" 

I stared at Roche in amazement. And then I 
laughed. 

"Jeffrey," said I, "you do it very well." 

" Do what ? No," said he, " it is n't acting. Who 
is he?" 

I told him, and added that the question had been 
put differently by the Irish members of Parliament 
a long time ago. They asked at one time — "Why 
is he?" After a while they asked nothing. 

"And your article said that the Irish party would 
turn against Parnell if the case were tried, and that 
the English Liberals would throw him over, and the 
Home Rule cause would go to pieces." 



PARNELL 249 

"Pardon me, Jeffrey, my article said that those 
would be some of the results if O'Shea won his case, 
not if the case were tried." 

"Gladstone would n't turn against Parnell !" 

"Jeffrey, if that 's all you know about the Irish 
Question, take my advice and return to Ireland by 
the next ship and study it on the spot. Then go 
to Westminster and study it there. Learn what 
the Unionists think, what Liberals think, and what 
Mr. Gladstone, as leader of the Liberal Party, has 
to think, and — " 

"It's another Piggott trick! Parnell's defence 
will show it all up." 

"Suppose he should n't defend himself?" 

"That's unfair!" 

"Let me tell you a thing or two. Make a note of 
'em, and see what happens within a year !" 

In the course of the next two hours Roche heard 
more of the inside of Irish and English politics than 
I would have supposed could previously have es- 
caped an editor's mind. It was clear that the com- 
ings and goings of Irish parliamentarians bent on 
propaganda and money-raising had not left behind 
much information that could guide a distant editor 
over a course abounding with obstacles. My ex- 
perience with Roche that evening resembled all the 
experiences I have ever had in the United States 
when talking on the Irish question with persons 
who seemed really anxious for information. And 
the situation is much the same at this hour, differ- 
ing only in kind, not in degree. 

The events of November and December, 1890, 



250 LONDON DAYS 

proved to my doubting friend the truth of all I had 
told in print or out of it during the preceding months. 
But he was as much surprised at the end of the year 
as he had been when I talked with him in May. 
Roche died years ago; perhaps he knew by that 
time how matters stood. At all events, perhaps 
he knows now. The Irish in America were not in 
those days, and have not been since then much or 
far behind the scenes of a certain political stage. 
They have paid their money, and, like other audi- 
ences, have remained in front to watch, to listen, to 
applaud, or to hiss. If they have frequently ap- 
plauded or derided in the wrong places, other audi- 
ences beholding other dramas have done no less. 

The conditions in Ireland, and concerning Ire- 
land, are not new to me. I have known them pretty 
well for forty years. If I were an Irishman I would 
think, no doubt, on most points political, with other 
fellow countrymen of my party. But what party 
would that be? I might answer, if you could tell 
me where I would have been born and of what 
religious faith. My sympathy with Ireland is deep ; 
it would be so, if only for the matchless, the invin- 
cible stupidity with which she has been and is still 
governed. But her "injustices" and "woes" have 
long since been wiped out. That is one thing they 
do not know in America. But it is unnecessary to 
go beyond certain Nationalist speeches in the House 
of Commons to learn as much. John Redmond 
said a good deal on that point. But now there are 
no Nationalist speeches, no Nationalist members 
to speak of. The Nationalist Party is dead. The 



PARNELL 251 

Irish seats in the House of Commons are empty, 
voluntarily empty. Had Ireland done her share 
in the War, she would have had Home Rule before 
the Armistice. But she would not do her share, 
and she does not appear to desire Home Rule, and 
Great Britain did not try to force her. In America 
the meaning of this is not quite understood. While 
Great Britain was sending millions of men to the 
front, while her manhood was everywhere con- 
scripted, while her fathers and sons were fighting 
the malignant German, while she was depriving her- 
self of money, food, clothing, economising in the 
very necessaries of life, not merely in order to provide 
for her armies, but to aid her allies, Ireland did 
nothing. Ireland's food was not rationed ; she 
had plenty and to spare; plenty to eat, plenty to 
drink, plenty to wear; petrol and motor cars were 
not forbidden her, they were forbidden to Britain ; 
the luxuries which Britain denied herself were 
abundant in Ireland ; she was, in fact, the most 
favoured country in Europe. She was never so 
prosperous as throughout the war. 

But not a hand would she lift to defend her soil 
against the Germans. Thousands of Irishmen were 
at the front; they fought splendidly, but it was 
not in accordance with the will of Ireland that they 
fought. It was because they willed it themselves. 
Ireland was exempted from conscription. Eng- 
lishmen and Scotsmen, Welshmen and Cornishmen, 
all the men and all the women from Land's End 
to John O'Groat's have long memories for things 
like that. And so have many Americans. 



252 LONDON DAYS 

It is useless, I suppose, to say that Parnell's 
course had he hved to and through the war time, 
still leading Irish politics, would have been this, 
or would have been that. He did not have to face 
such conditions; they were not forward in his 
time, but they were always at the back of the minds 
of some British statesmen, and he knew it. He knew 
that the dominant reason which stood between Ire- 
land and Independence was the need of Great Britain 
to guard herself against attacks and invasions from 
the Continent. France was thought to be the 
potential enemy then, as she had been supposedly 
since the days of Napoleon I. Well, we know what 
Germany did. England could no more allow the 
island on her western flank to become an independent 
power than the United States could permit any of 
her forty -eight States to break away from the family 
roof. Are arguments for separation based on racial 
and religious differences more valid in the case of 
Ireland than they are in the case of the United 
States? What are the racial differences between 
Ireland and Great Britain compared with the racial 
differences in the United States, differences which 
arose through conquest and purchase, not alone 
through immigration .f^ The Indians, the Mexicans, 
the Spaniards, the French, the Negroes .^^ And 
then the welter of immigrations on top of these? 
And is the argument for majority rule, based, as it 
is usually, upon the majority in Ireland, more 
valid? Ireland is, and has been for centuries, an 
integral part, a vital part of the political organism 
known since 1801 as "the United Kingdom", and 



Pz\RNELL 253 

of that organism the Irish population, in Ireland, is 
but a small minority of the whole ! In an age of 
democracy shall a minority rule? In the United 
States we know something about secession ; we have 
clear and firm opinions on it now. Why should 
we expect Britain to permit the secession of Ireland ? 
And if the Ulster problem presents such "vast 
difficulties", what becomes of the famous panacea 
— Self-Determination ? Won't the panacea work 
in Ulster's case ? 

These points were just as clear in Parnell's day as 
they are this morning. The Home Rule cause was 
one thing; the Separatist, Independence case was 
quite distinctly another thing. Parnell knew that 
he could never satisfy Ireland if Independence 
were what she wanted. The hot-heads in her poli- 
tics were seeking that and not Home Rule. Home 
Rule was almost won by Parnell; after him it was 
thrown away by bitter dissensions within his party. 
Thirty years more were required to bring the fac- 
tions to a point where they could pull together. 
Then the inevitable dissensions broke out anew. 
The power that had been John Redmond's slipped 
away, and Redmond's party went to pieces as 
Parnell's had done. It is folly to put the blame on 
the Nationalists alone, or on the Ulstermen alone. 
The conditions do not mix. They are antago- 
nistic. 

And, though the ideals of Ulster are not the ideals 
of the rest of Ireland, must Ulster be punished for 
her ideals ? Ulster asks the privilege of being loyal 
to Britain. Must she then be punished for her 



254 LONDON DAYS 

loyalty and punished by Britain? That is a ques- 
tion which Americans who are so frequently called 
upon to interfere in the Irish question never ask them- 
selves, because it is never presented to them. But 
if they were to ask it concerning any State in the 
American Union in its relation to the Government 
at Washington, there is no doubt what their answer 
would be. 

What of the rest of Ireland ? At present the 
Sinn Feiners have the floor. They proclaim openly 
what the Nationalists, or most of them, are said to 
have concealed ; their object, — Independence. But 
they know that if Ireland should become an Inde- 
pendent Power, she must meet her obligations of 
financial maintenance. She could not meet them 
without drawing upon, or absorbing the revenues of 
Ulster. And she might not be able to meet them 
then. Are these matters, and matters such as these, 
to be settled, or even helped by pious resolutions 
passed in Madison Square Garden, or Faneuil Hall, 
or the Congress at Washington.'^ 

It might be thought that the ingenuity of man, 
to say nothing of his justice, could find a way out 
of this age-long dilemma. It can be seen that the 
dilemma is not quite so simple as at a distance 
it has been commonly supposed. And it can be 
said that diflScult as the problem is, it has become 
none the less difficult through the conflict of views 
and policies of Sinn Feiners, clericals. Home Rulers, 
Ulstermen, the Asquith government, or the Lloyd- 
George government, politicians in America, or 
rhetoricians anywhere. 



PARNELL ^55 

I find that thirty years ago I wrote in an Ameri- 
can newspaper: "Parnell puzzles the British mind, 
because measures proposed in behalf of Ireland are 
rejected whether they come from Mr. Gladstone or 
from Mr. Balfour. It has not yet dawned upon the 
British mind that Parnell means that Parliament 
wastes its time over land bills and other remedial 
legislation ; that the Irish mean to settle the land 
question, and all other Irish questions, without 
English assistance. What he wants is Home Rule 
and not land acts. What he wants beyond Home 
Rule he does not say, and no one is in his confi- 
dence." 

It was all very well, but he could not prevent 
the Briton from bringing gifts, nor could he avoid 
him. The world has moved a long way since Parnell 
died and has brought changes of which he did not 
dream. But there, stripped of detail, was his object. 
If the ultimate object were not set forth, it was 
because he wanted Ireland to get Home Rule first. 
The difficulties of the step beyond that he knew well 
and appreciated thoroughly. Perhaps it was because 
he knew the British view so well, and could under- 
stand it so well because he was half-English and 
half-American, that his point of view was not limited 
by Irish experiences and aspirations. It may be 
that he did not expect Independence in his time, 
perhaps not really at any time. But whether 
he did or not, he said in the House of Com- 
mons, in April, 1890, "We have not based our 
claims to nationhood on the sufferings of our 
country." Well, if they were based on other 



^56 LONDON DAYS 

grounds, it is likely that he saw insurmountable 
obstacles in their way. 

I am far from agreeing with the conventional 
assertion that Parnell wrecked his party and post- 
poned Home Rule by a generation. Such assertions 
are made easily, and they are easily accepted by the 
crowd. They ignore many other factors, even 
factors that I have suggested here. And they 
ignore the necessity which all politicians were under, 
or supposed themselves to be under, of claiming a 
virtue, though some had it not. I think of some 
politicians who were professionally horrified over 
the O'Shea case, although their own lives would 
not have borne the examination of a divorce court, 
and who had not in their lives the mitigating cir- 
cumstance that Parnell had, — an absorbing love. 
And I think of the politicians who were professionally 
"surprised" but who had had a long preparation for 
what was coming. All the forces of hypocrisy and 
cant were let loose at that time, all the forces of 
envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness ; and 
they did not rest until Parnell was crushed and 
dead. The spectacle was enough to make one 
nauseated forever with politics — and some other 
things. 

Mrs. Parnell's book on her husband, published 
in 1916, throws a clear light upon that chapter in 
Parnell's life. I see no reason to doubt its state- 
ments and conclusions; I see many reasons for 
accepting them. They confirm the impressions 
that many of us had thirty years ago, and relate 
facts that some of us more than surmised at that 



PARNELL 257 

time, and before it. It is scarcely possible for them 
to deal with the hypocrisy and jealousy, revengeful- 
ness and cant that broke a man's life and a nation's 
cause. These were not in Ireland alone. Britain 
and America had their share. 

Was Parnell a great man ? I am inclined to think 
that he just missed greatness. If he had won, 
there would be no doubt, I suppose. That he was 
the man for his time there can be no denying. It 
is idle, I suppose, to speculate whether he would 
have been the man for the time after Home Rule 
had been gained, for then the duties would have 
been vastly different. And yet they would have 
called for qualities not common among Irishmen, 
among political Irishmen in Ireland, I mean, — 
the qualities that made him eminent and successful 
as a leader. He was not eloquent, but eloquence is 
not essential to greatness. He did not inspire 
affection, devotion. To this it may be answered 
that the people of his country loved him. So they 
did. But a great many politicians who were his 
followers did not. Some of them entertained for 
him emotions quite opposite to love. Of course he 
inspired respect ; more than that, he instilled fear 
into the hearts of his parliamentary army. They 
feared him then. But if his aloofness, his detach- 
ment from the usual, even the unusual, affairs of 
society and human interest, was one of his most 
remarkable characteristics, it was in his favour 
rather than against him, it contributed to "the 
mystery" in which his personality was shrouded, 
a mystery cultivated less by himself than by legend. 



258 LONDON DAYS 

An eminent politician whose life is isolated must 
be " mysterious " to the crowd. 

He did not care for the play, for music, for pic- 
tures, or for literature, excepting when literature 
bore upon the work in hand. He did not care for 
society, for sport, for games of any kind. And so 
he was a mystery to more countries than one. He 
was easily bored ; the ordinary life of politics bored 
him, his followers bored him; it often bored him 
to make a speech. His power was in his set pur- 
pose, his concentration upon it, his absolute dis- 
interestedness. Save in one instance, he ground 
no axe and was not the cause of axe-grinding by 
others. 

Although he was not an orator, he could and did 
put a case plainly, strongly, indeed with very great 
strength. He was cool when it paid to be cool, 
vigorous when vigour was required ; he was seldom 
impassioned. When he was angriest he was least 
stirred. Internally he might rage, as when under 
general attack, when the assailants were, in a double 
sense, offensive, but outwardly he would be calm and 
pale. You would know when he felt the fiercest 
stress, not by his voice nor by his actions, but by 
his pallor. It was only in the last months of his 
life that he gave his temper free rein, let himself 
go, fiercely lashed his opponents, hitherto his parti- 
sans. There was something of revenge in this, 
of resentful wrath long pent up. Who shall say 
it was not justified, or that it was unnatural ? 

What he would have been as an administrator 
we have no means of knowing. What he would 



PARNELL 259 

have been as the leader of an Irish parliament we 
may at least imagine. He had always been in 
Opposition. What he would have been in power 
we may guess but never know. But his lot would 
not have been enviable. It was never enviable. 
His death, in 1891, was a happy release. 



CHAPTER XVII 

"le brav' general'* 

Who was Boulanger ? 

At the Cheshire Cheese, a year before the war, a 
young Fleet Streeter asked the question. He had 
heard some of us spinning yarns. But the name of 
Boulanger meant nothing to him. The world was 
created in the year he came to Fleet Street, say in 
1908. 

There are times when I feel it necessary to apolo- 
gise for writing of the days of antiquity. There will 
certainly be some one to exclaim, when he sees the 
heading of this chapter, "Why drag Boulanger into 
London Days?^' 

One answer would be : Because I knew Boulanger 
in London. 

"Was he ever here ? How strange we should have 
forgotten it!" 

Not in the least strange. Boulanger was forgotten 
soon after he arrived. He arrived at the Hotel 
Bristol, behind Burlington House, and was cheered 
by a few waiters and chambermaids. It was a murky 
afternoon in the summer of '89, — dark, damp, and 
dreary. I saw him alight from his carriage. Some 
of the papers next day told of "the enthusiastic 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 261 

greeting" he had received. Thus history is made. 
A few waiters, a porter or two, half a dozen cham- 
bermaids, and, of course, a manager. These were 
the enthusiasts. 

It was a httle disappointing to those who love 
"scenes", or have to describe them. Nothing hap- 
pened. Of course, it was not disappointing to realise 
that one was a prophet. I had prophesied a scene 
like this, months before, when quite another kind of 
scene was being played in Paris, when Boulanger 
had the ball at his feet, or the game in his hands, if 
you prefer a choice of metaphors. He did n't play. 
There was merely an escape of gas from the balloon. 
The gas was not inflammable. 

"Le brav' General" they called him. Up to the 
twenty-eighth of January, 1889, he was the hope of 
France. He was to be Head of the Army, Prime 
Minister, or President, or King, or Emperor, or 
Dictator, whatever he chose. He was to save 
France. She needed saving. Politically, she was 
in the dismallest bog. She needed a man, thought 
she had found him in Boulanger, and on the twenty- 
seventh of January, Paris was to elect him to Par- 
liament. Paris would give him a backing so enor- 
mous that he would "seize the reins of power." 
There would be a coup d'etat. That was what the 
papers said. There was quite a commotion, natu- 
rally. 

Obviously I must go to Paris before the twenty- 
seventh ; I must see the coup d'etat whose approach 
was thundering from all the presses of Europe. 
There would be articles by the yard. In those 



262 LONDON DAYS 

times, newspaper reproductions of photographs were 
even less satisfactory than they are now. I looked 
about for an artist who could go with me and illus- 
trate my articles. He must know something about 
the trick of drawing for newspaper reproduction, he 
must be a quick worker, for there was no time to be 
lost, and he must not be too well known because the 
chances were that a well-known artist would n't be 
able to cast his work aside at a day's notice, and bolt 
with me for Paris. I sent my assistant to find the 
right man. 

He returned to me with a dejected look. "I Ve 
found only one man who can go," said he. 

"One is enough," said I. 

*'Yes, but — will he do.? I've only these two 
specimens of his work to show you." And he laid 
two small drawings before me. 

"Capital! "said I. 

"He has been in Paris, studied art there. And 
he lives in Chelsea." 

"Terms all right ?" I asked. 

"Yes." 

"Then I '11 see him to-morrow. By the way, 
what is his name ? 

"L. Raven-Hill." 

And so it came about that the young man — he 
was a very young man then, under twenty-two — 
who was to win fame as one of the principal car- 
toonists for Punch, went to Paris with me and illus- 
trated the Boulanger election. He illustrated for 
me other subjects in and about Paris. And when I 
went to Ireland, to do a series of articles a little 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 263 

later, he was the illustrator. And he drew London 
subjects for me. In fact, he was for about six 
months my chosen illustrator. Then somebody in 
authority on the other side of the Atlantic wanted 
the preference given to certain other artists. Au- 
thority, of course, had to be obeyed, since it was 
paymaster. And in this case it had in its eye one or 
two young men who had come abroad, and who 
had influence enough to pull strings at headquarters. 
They were cousins to the owner's aunts, or some- 
thing like that. Their work was too careless, gro- 
tesque, and altogether weak. After allowing them 
sufficient opportunity to demonstrate this, even to 
the satisfaction of their proprietary relatives, they 
were released from service. And ever afterwards I 
insisted upon choosing my own illustrators. But 
meantime I had lost Raven-Hill, and some foreign 
mission calling me afield, there was no opportunity 
for renewing the connection. When I returned to 
London, Raven-Hill had found his feet, as I knew he 
would. The other day we compared our recollec- 
tions of that time. They did not differ. 

His work was admirable, even in those early days. 
It lent distinction to the text. I daresay that may 
have been the only distinction the text had. Raven- 
Hill entered into the spirit of the thing, and would 
go to any inconvenience to get what I wanted. And 
in the Boulanger campaign, that meant a good deal 
of inconvenience. We travelled by night trains 
because they were cheapest. If they were cheapest, 
they were also slowest. But all was grist that came 
to our mill. 



264 LONDON DAYS 

Paris we reached two days before the election. 
We looked for excitement but found none. It is not 
every day that Paris elects a "Saviour of France." 
It was preparing to elect one, and it was certain that 
he was to save France. There was a frenzy of bill- 
posting, but that was all. All the electioneering 
was done by post and posters. Not a speech was 
made. Posters covered everything, inches deep. 
Paris was smothered by them. Boulanger posters 
were covered with Jacques posters. Jacques was the 
candidate opposing "Le brav' General." Jacques 
was a nobody with money. Only a nobody with 
money could have afforded to stand against *' Le 
brav' General." Before he offered himself for the 
sacrifice, nobody had ever heard of Jacques. After 
election day nobody heard of him again. He had 
his little explosion of glory, and then happy ob- 
scurity. But his account for bill-posting and print- 
ing must have been heavy. So must have been 
Boulanger's. 

Statuary was covered with bills, and so were cabs. 
A Boulangist would plaster a bill over the nose of a 
bronze lion. A Jacquesist would follow and cover 
the Boulangist bill. The lion in the Place de la 
Republique was hideous with bills from his snout 
to the tip of his tail, a great-coat of paper. Above 
the lion a stone shaft was inscribed : 

A 

LA GLOIRE 

DE LA 

REPUBLIQUE 

FRANCAISE 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 265 

The Glory of the French Republic seemed great 
enough to bear with equanimity the burden of 
Boulangist printing. The men who were posting 
Boulangist bills carried ladders. The Jacques men 
had no ladders. And so the Boulangists had the 
best of it. Wherever there was a smooth surface, 
and in numerous places where there was not, bills 
went up. They were manifestoes, proclamations, 
election cries. Nobody made a speech. The printer 
did all. Arches, fagades, trees, cabs, even the 
Opera House itself, theatres, shops, were splashed 
with coloured bills, Boulanger over Jacques and 
Jacques over Boulanger. And only small boys took 
notice. 

The papers said that large reserves of police were 
held in readiness ; they said the military had been 
strengthened. One of them said that detachments 
of cavalry had been shod with rubber so they might 
come noiselessly upon rioters and smite them una- 
wares. An editor applauded the ingenious device. 
He forgot that King Lear, long before, had thought 
it 

"... a delicate stratagem 

To shoe a troop of horse with felt." 

The London papers were even more excited than the 
French. In fact, it had been the alarmist reports 
of Paris correspondents and news bureaux that had 
incited me to the journey. I looked for the exciting 
scenes these gentlemen had witnessed and foretold. 
There was nothing visible to justify their fears. 
Where were the marching crowds that were singing 
"The Marseillaise"? They had not marched, they 



QQQ LONDON DAYS 

had not assembled, they had not sung a note. It is 
not easy to describe an invisible demonstration. 

We went wherever a demonstration was possible 
or probable ; we covered Paris by cab, by bus, on foot. 
Excepting for the posters, Paris carried itself as 
usual. 

"Go to the Fourth Arrondissement if you would 
see the fun," said a friendly councillor who knew the 
ropes. We went, but "the fun" did not come. We 
found three hundred persons at the mairie, half of 
them registering, and the other half looking on. 
They were as solemn as if they had been paying 
taxes. The next day, Sunday, the voting took 
place. There were 568,697 voters on the registries 
of Paris. Of these 32,837 did not vote at all, and 
27,118 voted neither for Boulanger nor for Jacques. 
Boulanger won, hands down. 

At eleven o'clock on the Sunday morning we were 
at Boulanger's house, expecting that the world 
would be there. The world was not there, nor was 
anybody but ourselves. The Rue Dumont d'Urville 
(Boulanger lived at Number 11) looked deserted. 
It was off the Champs ElysSes, near the Arc de 
Triomphe. A thousand persons a day had, for 
weeks, been calling on "Le brav' General." In the 
preceding fortnight the number had doubled. "To- 
day the General receives no one," said the boy in 
buttons who was sweeping out the hall. So much 
the better; if he receives no one to-day, the more 
chance of seeing him. Besides, Raven-Hill wanted 
to draw Boulanger from the life. It would be a fine 
thing to have drawn the "Saviour of France" on the 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 267 

day when he saved France ; perhaps while he was in 
the very act of saving her. 

"It is impossible," repeated the boy in buttons, 
"the General does not receive to-day." 

But the General was a political candidate, and the 
boy in buttons was a Jew. Palm oil passed from one 
of us to the buttoned youth. Raven-Hill sketched 
him. Jointly we begged for his autograph. He 
wrote it underneath his portrait — "Joseph." 

"Joseph," said I, "you are famous from this hour. 
Your portrait will appear in an American news- 
paper." Joseph grinned. He yielded. He dis- 
appeared with our cards. Returning presently, he 
said that the General would receive us, and he di- 
rected us up the stairs. On a landing above stood 
"Le brav' General." He bowed, he shook hands in 
the English fashion, he did not embrace us in the 
French ; he smiled, he bade us enter his study. 
Monsieur I'artiste might sketch where he liked. 
And R-H. sat in a corner, which commanded the 
large room, and began to draw without losing a 
minute. 

Would M. le General talk with me a little while 
the artist drew ? 

M. le General begged a thousand pardons, but he 
was too much occupied; moreover he was never 
interviewed. Would we smoke .f* We would. He 
passed cigarettes. 

"But, M. le General, the election.?"" 

*'C^est une chose faite!" 

That was all he would say. And then it was only 
eleven in the morning. But he declared that the 



268 LONDON DAYS 

thing was done. And this with a calmly complacent 
air. I admired his "nerve", as we would say in 
America. But that was all he would say : 

"C'est une chose faite!'' 

He repeated it. And I took it that France was 
saved. And so she was, but not in the way he had 
expected ; and not by him. 

Raven-Hill, whose French was at any rate in better 
working order than mine, tried questioning, but " Le 
brav' General," with great courtesy, begged a thou- 
sand pardons and deprecated "interviewing." 

I begged ten thousand pardons, and R-H. resumed 
his sketching. " Le brav' General " handed me a 
small bundle of printed matter, — pamphlets, proc- 
lamations, manifestoes, announcements. I would 
find it all there, he said. I looked them over, 
thanking him, and saying that I had previously 
read them, which was the case. 

"Ah," said he, ''c'est une chose faite." 

As a matter qf fact, I was quite content. I was 
getting what I wanted, the drawings. I did not 
want political platitudes, and before election day I 
had formed the opinion that political platitudes were 
the General's stock-in-trade. He had not a single 
political idea. What he always said was what his 
backers wanted him to say. 

He was "the man-on-horseback ", and that was 
enough. France had been looking a long time for 
the man-on-horseback. He would ride in and 
conquer the internal foes of France ; they were 
numerous enough and to spare. He would unite 
the country, bring it stabiHty, cleanse the Augean 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 269 

stables, win back Alsace-Lorraine, humble the 
Germans who had humiliated them, who had men- 
aced them ever since 1870-1871. He would be a 
MAN, this man-on-horseback. And Boulanger had 
been riding a white horse these three years. Some- 
times he rode a black horse. 

At one end of the room, behind the chair where he 
sat at his writing table, was a large painting, a very 
large one, of General Boulanger on his horse. 

The room in which we sat was large, too. It had 
been a studio and was now a study. A great fire- 
place occupied one end of it, and the General on 
horseback occupied the other end. The general 
himself sat below the portrait, at his writing table, 
while Raven-Hill drew and I smoked. He could 
not have better suited the artist's purpose. He was 
not quite like the photographs, engravings, paint- 
ings, "reproductions" of him that one had seen, and 
that filled France. His hair was not clear black, 
and brushed nattily ; it was streaked with grey, and 
worn shoe-brush fashion. His beard was tawny, 
touched with grey. His face was a stronger one, 
his head a better one, than the conventional por- 
traits prepared you for. He was between fifty-one 
and fifty-two at that time. A handsome man, but 
disappointing. He did n't impress one as being a 
man of authority, of decisions. What his mouth 
was like, and what his chin, I do not know. His 
beard concealed them. But I did not get from him 
the impression of strength. And yet he was the most 
popular man in France. And that day the eyes not 
only of France, but of Europe, were watching him. 



270 LONDON DAYS 

His face was deeply lined ; his eyes were grey ; he 
was in fatigue dress. May I whisper in your ear? 
I do not believe that he was pressed with work; I 
believe that he was posing for us. 

He was a vain creature. His vanity had been 
much indulged during the three years or more 
preceding. He was an ordinary man of showy 
gifts, an efficient general in a small way. He had 
been a favourite of fortune, and usually in trouble 
with his superior officers. He always came out of 
the trouble "at the top of the heap", as they say. 
Freycinet made him Minister of War in '86. The 
Ministry of War advertised him up and down the 
land. It may be said to have begun his popularity. 
He looked well after the lot of the private soldier. 
As the private soldier came from every home in 
France, Boulanger had advocates who carried his 
name and praises to every fireside. He understood 
that sort of thing. His star was rising fast. He 
glittered before the eyes of all men. He was an 
heroic figure at reviews, a much sought figure in 
drawing-rooms ; the clericals were zealous in his 
favour, purses were at his disposal. He was the 
popular hero, without having done anything heroic. 
Powerful partisans played, even paid for his favour. 
His principal backer was the Duchesse D'Uzes. 
There was an abundance of money. 

Well, when the artist had got what he wanted, 
had drawn the room and Boulanger, we took our 
leave and went forth for the melancholy Jacques 
and election scenes, saying au revoir to Joseph at 
the door. Joseph said — I think he had been in- 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 271 

structed to say it — and he said it with an air of one 
who whispered confidences : 

"The General will dine this evening at the Cafe 
Durand." 

The Cafe Durand, of course, was opposite the 
Madeleine. We stopped there on our way about 
town. We lunched there, and made friends with 
the head waiter, Edmond, a portly personage of 
manner and renown. Edmond was enlisted, as 
Joseph had been. And he signed his portrait with a 
flourish quite royal — Edmond Ulray. 

Could R-H. see the private room in which General 
Boulanger and his friends would dine that evening ? 

But certainly. And Monsieur could draw it if 
he chose. 

Of course, that was what he chose to do. And 
when the evening came, it was quite a simple matter 
for Edmond to arrange that R-H., without being 
seen, should draw " Le brav' General", and Comte 
Dillon, and Paul de Cassagnac, Henri Rochefort, 
and Paul Deroulade, at the table, in the front room, 
up one flight, on the corner overlooking the Made- 
leine. 

Here was the centre of interest that night, — that 
room in the Cafe Durand. Would " Le brav' Gen- 
eral" press the button there, spring his coup d'etaU 
show himself to the crowd, and proceed triumphantly 
from there to the Elysees? That was what the 
crowd expected. That was what it wanted. I was 
outside with the crowd. R-H. was inside, sketching. 
It was marvellous how quickly he worked. 

The crowd knew that Boulanger was in the Cafe 



272 LONDON DAYS 

Durand; they knew that Jacques was in a cafe on 
the opposite side of the way; they knew which was 
the winner. And the thoroughfares were packed 
with people. They wanted to march, they wanted 
to sing, they wanted to cheer. But nobody started 
them. There was no demonstration. Neither side 
wished a demonstration to go the wrong way. Both 
sides knew that the government had determined to 
put down riots, revolutions, and disorders. But 
why did n't somebody start something ? Jacques, 
being defeated, did not show himself. Boulanger 
was victorious, but he did not show himself. The 
crowd moved back and forth, packed within the 
boulevards. But nothing happened. No hero ap- 
peared at a window ; nobody made a speech ; not a 
curtain was drawn aside; not a flag fluttered. By 
midnight the crowd had gone home to bed. 

And that is why I prophesied that night Bou- 
langer's utter collapse and his probable flight for 
safety. Little wisdom was required to make the 
prophecy. A man who has the ball at his foot and 
doesn't kick it is not the "saviour" of a nation. 
Boulanger had lost his chance. The next day he 
was no longer the most popular of Frenchmen. 

He "saved France" by his failure. 

A little later he fled to Belgium. A little later 
still he turned up in London, as I have said. But 
he did not stay long at the Hotel Bristol. He took 
a furnished house, Number 51 Portland Place, 
brought his horses from Paris, and gave out that he 
would ride in the Park at the fashionable hour. But 
he did not ride. And as he did not keep his word 



"LE BRAV GENERAL" 273 

in so small a matter, London lost what small interest 
it had in him when he did ride, or when he received. 
One day "a grand Boulangist demonstration" was 
announced to take place at the Alexandra Palace. 
Proceedings, more or less elaborate, were advertised, 
and they were to end with a "banquet" at five 
shillings a head. Covers were to be laid for twenty- 
six hundred persons. Only six hundred persons 
appeared. Boulanger was to be "the lion of the 
season." I don't know who thought so besides him- 
self. He issued an address "To the People; My 
Sole Judge", meaning the people of Paris. The 
address was nine columns long ! 

It fell to my lot to interview him on two or three 
occasions. I did not wish to do so, but there were 
requests from headquarters. Each time he sang 
the old songs. The interview that you had with 
him one week would do for another, with the change 
of a few words. He really liked to talk. He pre- 
tended that he disliked being interviewed on political 
subjects, but that was mere mock-modesty. He 
spoke English well enough. In fact, he had been 
a schoolboy at Brighton, and he had represented 
France at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia 
in 1876. He was merely "layin' low" that day in 
Paris, like Brer Fox, only he was not Brer Fox, his 
one desire being not to have anything said or done 
on the twenty-seventh of January that would give 
the Government an excuse for a raid on his designs. 
I think he was rather a pitiable object. Few others 
thought so before the twenty-eighth of January, 
1889. He was merely a mechanism for the issue of 



274 LONDON DAYS 

promissory notes. It was about two years after his 
arrival in London that he committed suicide on the 
continent. 

How well he illustrated Lincoln's saying about 
"fooling the people"! But he did not fool himself. 
He was the tool of more designing persons. 

" C'est une chose faite" 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbsdeen Untversitt, 85 
Acting, art of, 187, 188, 191 
Admiralty, the, 11 
Agassiz, Mrs., 128 
Alaska (steamer), 6 
Albert Hall, 16 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, anec- 
dote of, 227-228; on Tenny- 
son Memorial committee, 128 
Aldworth, summer home of Tenny- 
son, 125, 126 
Aldwych, 11 

Alhambra (music hall), 16 
Alma-Tadema, Sir Laurens, 45, 52 
Alsaiia (Anchor Line steamer), 

1 ; description of, 3-4 
"Altavona" (by Blackie), 87 
Amiens, 24 ; cathedral of, 20 
Anecdotes of Aldrich, 227-228; 
of Drummond, 181-182; of 
Gladstone, 232-233; of Tenny- 
son, 121, 122-123, 129-130, 
134, 136; of Whistler, 157- 
160, 162, 163, 164, 166-167 
Antiquary (magazine), 133 
Architecture of London, 10-13 
Arizona (Guion Line steamer), 6, 39 
Arnold, Sir Edwin, quoted, 124 
Artistic sensibilities, author's com- 
ment on, 237-238 
Atelier Gleyre, Paris, 45 

Bancrofts, the 16, 53, 186 
Barbour, Robert W., description 

of Professor Blackie, 92-95 
Barrie, Sir James, 17 
Beaconsfield, Lord, quoted, 142 
Bell, Alexander Graham, brings 

telephone instruments to Europe, 

106 



Besant, Sir Walter, 17 

Betterton, fame of, 185 

Bismarck, 139 

Black, William, 17, 53 

Blackie, John Stuart, 79-95; an- 
cestry and early life, 84-85; 
as a teacher, 85-86, 90; Bar- 
bour's word picture of, 92-95 ; 
comments on pictures in home, 
88-89 ; compiles anthology of 
Scottish songs, 87; conversa- 
tion of, 83-84 ; description 
of, 79-80, 81, 91; endows a 
profeisorship at Edinburgh, 87; 
home of, 87 ; lecture in Glas- 
gow, 91 ; lecturer in Scotland, 
86; love for Greek, 82, 90; 
novel by, 87; patriotism of, 
87; portraits of, 88; quoted, 
79-80, 81, 82-83, 84, 85, 86-87, 
89, 90, 91, 95; study of, 90; 
works of, 86-87 

Blackwood, 53 

Booth, Edwin, 186 ; art of, 192 

Boston Courier, author's first copy 
published in, 28 

Boston Herald, author's engage- 
ment with, 39-41 ; author's 
article published in, 248 

Bottomley, Dr. J. T., assistant to 
Lord Kelvin, 106 

Boulanger, General, 260-274 ; 
address of, 273; arrival in 
London, 260-261 ; as candi- 
date for French Parliament, 
261, 264-265; at cd6 dinner, 
271 ; author's impressions of, 
268, 269, 270, 272, 273-274; 
collapse and flight, 272; com- 
mitted suicide, 274; demonstra- 



278 



INDEX 



tion for, at Alexandra Palace, 
273; description of, 269-270; 
drawn by Raven-Hill, 209, 271 ; 
elected to Parliament, 266; 
interviewed, 273; "man on 
horseback," 268-269; Min- 
ister of War, 270; represented 
France at Centennial Exposi- 
tion, 273 

Braddon, Miss, 17 

Bridge, Sir Frederick, organist 
at Westminster Abbey, 53, 
55,56 

Brixton (London), 2, 3 

Browning, Mrs., quoted, 52, 54 

Browning, Robert, burial in West- 
minster Abbey, 51-50; death 
of, 51 ; friendship with Mosch- 
eles, 42, 44, 47, 50; portrait 
of, 46 

Bryce, Lord, 52 

Buildings, discomfort of some Eng- 
lish, 13; interiors of English, 
12-13; London public, 11, 12; 
warming of English, 12-13 

Burbage, fame of, 185 

Burdett-Coutts, Baroness, welcom- 
ing Stanley, 206, 207 

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 53 

Burns, John, 222; agitator in 
"Dock Strike," 223, 229-234; 
anecdote of Gladstone, 232- 
233; day with Meredith, 224- 
234, 238; dress, 234, 239; 
hobbies of, 226-227; meet- 
ings with author, 223, 229- 
234, 238, 239 

Busses, 13-14 

Butler, Doctor (of Trinity Col- 
lege), 53 

Cable, first Atlantic, 100; 
broke, 101 ; final success of, 
102; first message over, 101; 
laid, 101 ; Lord Kelvin's con- 
nection with, 100; operated, 101 



Cadogan Gardens, home of Mosch- 
eles in, 42, 47, 50 

Cafe Royal, 16 

Calais, 18 

Cameron, Mrs., 115; anecdote of, 
115-116; description of, 115, 116, 
117 ; distributes her photographs, 
122; encounter with Garibaldi, 
116; energy of, 119; letter quoted, 
123-124 ; photographs of Tenny- 
son, 117-118 

Canterbury, 18; Archbishop of, 54 

Capel, Monsignor, 34-39; author's 
meeting with, 35 ; visit to, 37-38 ; 
death, 39; description of, 35-36, 
37 ; goes to America, 39 ; home 
of, 36; hospitality of, 37; loss 
of standing, 38 ; pamphlet by, 38 

Carlton, Hotel, 16 

Carlyle, Thomas, 162; Whistler's 
portrait of, sold, 166-167 

Carlyle Mansions, 165 

Cecil, Hotel, 15 

Cedar Villa (Kensington), ten- 
ants of, 36, 37 

CederstrOm, Baroness, see Patti 

Century Magazine, 45 

Chelsea Hospital bombed, 135 

Cheshire Cheese, London, 260 

Cheyne Walk, Whistler's house 
in, 161 ; author's home in, 
49, 161, 164, 222 

Cinema, limitations of, 186-187 

Civil War, American, Gladstone's 
attitude toward, 143 

Clemenceau, 139, 140 

Cleveland, Grover, portrait of, 46 

Coliseum the, 16 

Colvin, Sir Sidney, 52 

Committee Room Fifteen, 240, 241 

Comparison of English and Ameri- 
can heating, 12-13; of French 
and English, 19; of sea travel, 
3,4-5 

Craig-y-Nos Castle «(home of 
Patti), 57; beauty of, 61; 



INDEX 



279 



description of, 71-72; enter- 
tainments at, 74; evenings at, 
70 ; guests at, 58-59, 71 ; lan- 
tern show at, 77; life at, 
71 ; meals at, 60, 61, 67 ; merri- 
ment at, 68 ; orchestrion at, 
70; party at, 76-77; salute 
to author from, 78; theatre 
in, 72 ; treasures of, 75 ; view 
from, 60 
Criterion (restaurant), 16 

Davy, Sir Humphry, 110 

De Keyser's Academy (Antwerp), 
45 

Deland, Margaret, on Tenny- 
son Memorial Committee, 128 

"Dimbola" (home of Watts, and 
later of Mrs. Cameron), 115, 119 

Dollis Hill (Lord Aberdeen's 
home), 153, 154 

" Dombey and Son ", clothiers, 1 

Drummond, Henry, 170-184 ; 
achievements of, 178, 182 ; anec- 
dote of, 181-182; capacity for 
friendship, 171 ; death, 184 ; 
description of, 172, 174, 176; 
financial independence, 179 ; 
friendship with D. L. Moody, 
171, 178; geologist, 174; home, 
175; lecturer at Lowell In- 
stitute. Boston, 175; opinion 
of Gladstone, 184; optimism, 
181 ; popularity of books, 
171, 172, 174; professor in 
Free Church College, at Glas- 
gow, 174; quoted, 171, 172, 
177, 179-181, 182-183, 184 

Drury Lane Theatre ("Old 
Drury"), 16, 90 

Du Maurier, George, 53 

Edinburgh, 79, 80 ; University, 85 
Electricity, first house in Britain 

lighted by, 105; transmission 

of, 102-103 



Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 

109 
Emin Pasha, 205 
Empire (theatre), 16 
English discomforts, 13; ills, 13 
"Essays on Social Subjects" (by 

Blackie), 86 

Fame, length of an actor's, 
186 

Faraday, Michael, discovery of, 
101 

Farrar, Dean, 53 

Farringford (home of Lord Tenny- 
son), 114; description of, 119, 
126; views from, 120 

"Felix Mendelssohn's letters to 
Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles ", 
44 

Fenchurch Street Station (Lon- 
don), 1, 7 

Field, Cyrus, connection with lay- 
ing American cable, 101 

Fields, James T. (publisher), 
130, 131 

Fields, Mrs. James T., on Tenny- 
son Memorial Committee, 128 

Fleet Street, 8, 15, 26 

Flint Cottage, Box Hill (Mere- 
dith's home), 223-224 

Floyth, Mrs., housekeeper to 
John Stuart Mill, 7-8 

Foch, General, 139 

Forbes-Robertson, Sir John- 
ston, 16, 187 

Ford, Sheridan, pursuit of, by 
\Miistler, 160-161 

"Four Phases of Morals" (by 
Blackie), 86 

France formerly considered Eng- 
land's potential enemy, 252 

Free Church College, Glasgow, 
174 

French and English, compari- 
son of, 19 

Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 117, 



280 



INDEX 



118, 122; author's fondness 
for, 114, 115; description of, 
114; Lady Ritchie's home at, 
134-135; life at, 136; Tenny- 
son's home at, 114; Walker's 
theory regarding its antiquity, 
131-133; Watts' home at, 115 
Froude J. A. (historian), 52 

Garibaldi at Farringfobd, 116 

Garrick, fame of, 185 

"Gentle Art of Making Enemies " 
(by Whistler), 158, 159, 160, 
161 

Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 
138-156; achievements of, 138; 
attitude toward American Civil 
War, 143, toward Irish question, 
143 ; at Lord Aberdeen's house, 
153-154; as an actor, 152; au- 
thor's opinion of, 140, 141-142, 
144, 145, 148, 150; Burns' 
story of, 232-233; Drum- 
mond's opinion of, 184; elo- 
quence of, 138, 140, 141-142, 
156; energy of, 145, 150; face 
of, 148, 151 ; influence of, 
138, 151, 155; integrity of, 
139; interest in causes, 143, 
153; leadership, 141, 151, 
153; letter to Patti, 62-63; 
object of adulation and ha- 
tred, 142-143 ; opinion of Turks, 
138; power of concentration, 
152, 153; quotation from Mor- 
ley's "Life" of, 141; quoted, 
146-147, 150; tribute at Man- 
chester, 149-150 ; unsurpassed 
as a talker, 138 

Glasgow University, 97, 99 

Gordon, Gen. C. G., as a fighter, 
147 

Gounod, portrait of, 46 

Grand Hotel, 15 

"Great Britain and Rome" 
(pamphlet by Capel), 38 



Great Central Hotel, 16 

Great Eastern (cable-laying ship), 

112 
Greeley, Horace, handwriting 

of, 188-189 
Grove, Sir George, 53 

Hambourg, Mark, descrip- 
tion OF, 47-48 

Hanway, Jonas, 15 

Hare, John, 16, 53, 186 

Harrison, Frederic, 52 

Harte, Bret, 53, 217 

Hats, 15 

Haymarket Theatre, 16 

Haythornthwaite, Father Peter, 
friend of Tennyson, 122, 126 

Heating, comparison of English 
and American, 12-13 

Helmholtz, quoted, 110 

Heyermans (artist), 45 

Hippodrome, 16 

Holborn Restaurant, 16 

Holborn Viaduct, lighting on, 9 

Holmes, Doctor Oliver Wendell, 
on Tennyson Memorial Com- 
mittee, 128 

Holyoake, George Jacob, por- 
trait of, 46 

Home Rule cause (Ireland), 251, 
252, 253, 256 

"Homer and the Iliad " (by 
Blackie), 86 

Hooper (cable-laying ship), 112 

Hotels, 15-16 

Houghton, H. O., on Tennyson 
Memorial Committee, 128 

Howe, Julia Ward, on Tenny- 
son Memorial Committee, 128 

Hughes-Stanton, H., R.A. ; home 
of, 36 

Hunt, Holman, 52, 216 

"In Bohemia with George du 

Maurier" (by Moscheles), 44 
Individuals and the masses, 197 



INDEX 



281 



Ireland, argument for majority 
rule in. 252-253; attitude in 
World War, 251 ; author's views 
on, 250-257 ; conditions in, 250 ; 
exempted from conscription, 
251; Home Rule in, 251, 252; 
ideals of, 253 ; parties in, 254 ; 
racial differences with Great 
Britain, 252; vital part of 
England's political organism, 
252 

Irish question, 138, 143; igno- 
rance of Americans concerning, 
247, 249, 250, 254 

Irving, Sir Henry, 16, 52, 185- 
204; air of authority, 201; 
achievements, 191 ; appeal to 
the eye, 192; as actor-manager, 
193, 194; at Drury Lane, 190; 
author's opinion of acting, 191, 

192, 193; burial at Westminster 
Abbey, 190; death, 188, 190, 
204 ; delineation of character, 
192; first-night customs, 204; 
first visit to America, 46 ; hand- 
writing, 188, 189 ; hospitality, 
202; in "Merchant of Venice", 

193, 194, 195. 198; in private 
life, 201-202; Hmitations, 191; 
loss of popularity, 190; loy- 
alty of public, 190-191, 197; 
management of Lyceum Theatre, 
190; mannerisms. 188, 191. 

194, 199-201; national figure, 
188; place as an actor, 187- 
188, 204; signature, 189; sup- 
per parties, 203-204 

Israels, portrait of, 46 

Jefferson, Joseph, 186 

Jephson (Stanley's oflBcer), 209- 
211 

Jewett, Sarah Orne, on Tenny- 
son Memorial Committee, 128 

Joachim, violinist, friend of Mosch- 
eles, 45 



Joule, James Prescott, 110; ap- 
preciated by Kelvin, 111 
Journalist, as a party man, 146 
Jowett. Professor, 53 

Kelvin, Lord, 96-113; achieve- 
ments of, 99, 112; acquires 
White's business, 100; addresses 
Royal Society in London, 104- 
105; ancestry, 98; appointed 
professor of Natural Philosophy, 
at Glasgow University, 97 ; char- 
acter of, 97, 98, 108, 112; chooses 
title, 99; early days, 98; en- 
ergy of, 96-97, 113; enters 
university at ten, 97; fiftieth 
anniversary at Glasgow, 109; 
first published papers, 110; 
fondness for asking questions, 
108-109; greatest master of 
natural science of 19th cen- 
tury, 97. 107; installs tele- 
phone in home, 106; introduces 
electric lighting in home, 105 ; 
inventions of, 100, 106; lame- 
ness of, 103, 108; made a peer, 
99 ; method of conducting classes, 
103-104, 108; outlines plan 
of boy's education, 97-98; 
practicality of, 99-100, 103- 
104, 105 ; prophecy regarding 
electricity, 102-103 ; quoted. 
110, 112, regarding energy, 
111; Sir William Ramsay's 
opinion of, 103-104; study of, 
112; theory of existence of 
organic life, 107; typical day 
of, 113; work on Atlantic 
cables, 100; yachtsman and 
master navigator, 106 

Kendals, the, 16, 186 

Kinglake, A. W., 52 

Kings way, 11 

Kipling, Rudyard, 17 

Knight, Professor (of St. An- 
drews University), 53 



282 



INDEX 



Knowles, James, of Nineteenth 
Century, designer of Tennyson's 
home at Aldworth, 125 

Lablache, singer, friend of 
moscheles, 45 

Lalla Rookh, Lord Kelvin's yacht, 
106 

"Language and Literature of the 
Scottish Highlands" (by 

Blackie), 87 

Lathrop, George Parsons, Bos- 
ton editor, 28 

Law Courts, the, 15 

Leadenhall Street (London), 1, 2 

League of Nations, 140 

Lecky (historian), 52 

Leighton, Lord, 53 

"Letters, Poems, and Pensees " 
(Barbour), 92 

"Life" of Gladstone, Morley's, 
quoted, 141 

Li Hung Chang, as a questioner, 
108-109 

London, architecture of, 10-13; 
charm of, 10, 13; description 
of, 1, 2, 10; drawbacks, 9; 
Esperanto Club of, 48; "finest 
site in Europe", 11; former 
leisure of travel in, 13-14; hats 
in, 15 ; hotels in, 15-16 ; improve- 
ments of, 11; interiors of build- 
ings, 12-13; in the late 
seventies, 9-17; lighting of, 
9; most livable place in world, 
9; music halls, 16; public 
buildings of, 11 ; regiments 
in, 17; restaurants, 16; street 
cries in, 14 ; theatre crowds, 
194, 195-196. 197; ugliness 
of modern, 11; views in, 12; 
writers in, 16-17 

London Bridge, 17 

"London Letters" of author, 29, 30 

Lowell Institute, Boston, Drum- 
mond lectures at, 175 



Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Ave- 
bury), 52 

Lyceum Theatre, 187, 202; au- 
thor's experiences in attending, 
194, 195-196; great produc- 
tions at, 193, 194, 200; man- 
agement of Ir\'ing, 190 

Mackenzie, Sir Morell, de- 
scription of Patti's throat, 69 

Macmillan (publisher), 53 

Maiden's Croft, Farringford, Isle 
of Wight, 120 

Malibran, singer, friend of Mosch- 
eles, 45 

Mann, Tom, portrait of, 46 

Manning, Cardinal, 39 

Marchmont Street (London), 7 

Maris (artist), 45 

Martin, Sir Theodore, 53 

Masson, Professor, 53 

Mazzini, portrait of, 46 

Memorial to Lord Tennyson, 
127-129; American contributors 
to, 128; inscription on, 128, 129 

Mendelssohn, friendship with 
Moscheles, 43, 45 

Meredith, George, 16, 52, 222- 
239; conversation with John 
Burns and author, 229-234; 
day with, 224-234, 238; de- 
scription of, 224-225, 234-236; 
publisher's reader, 227, 236- 
237 ; sensitiveness, 236 ; strength 
of perception, 235; tribute to 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 227; 
voice, 225, 234 

Metropole (hotel), 15 

Mifl3in, George H., on Tenny- 
son Memorial Committee, 128 

Moody, D. L. (revivalist), 171; 
tour with Sankey and Drum- 
mond, 178 

Morland, George, 118 

Moscheles, Charlotte, portrait 
of, 46 



INDEX 



283 



Moscheles, Felix, 42-50; at- 
tainments of, 43, 46; birth, 43; 
celebrated friends of, 45 ; death, 
43; fellow students, 45; 
friendship with Browning, 42, 
44, 47, 50; godson of Mendels- 
sohn, 43; home in Cadogan 
Gardens, 42, 46, in Elm Park 
Road, 47; hospitality of, 47, 
50; interest in Esperanto, 48; 
literary work of, 44-45; meet- 
ing with Du Maurier, 45, 
with Stepniak, 49; moved to 
Leipzig, 45; "Pictures with a 
Purpose ", 46-47 ; portraits 
painted by, 46; study in Ant- 
werp, 45, in Paris, 45; Sunday 
afternoons with, 44, 49-50; 
visited America with Irving and 
Terry, 46; water colours of, 
46 

Moscheles, Ignaz, 43; friendship 
with Mendelssohn, 43, 45; 
moved to Leipzig, 45 

Muller, Max, 52 

Murray, Henry, disappointment of, 
6; in London, 7, 39; on board 
the Alsatia, 5 

Murray, John, 53 

"Musa Burschicosa" (by Blackie), 
87 

National Gallery, 10 
Nationalist Party. 250, 251, 25S, 

254; death of, 250; speeches 

of, 250 
"Natural Law in the Spiritual 

World" (by Professor Drum- 

mond), 172, 173-174 
Neilson, Adelaide, 16 
Nelson (Stanley's officer), 209, 211 
Newport (Isle of Wight), 114 
New York Tribune, appeal for 

Tennyson Memorial in, 128; 

author's article in, 49 
Niagara, plan to harness, 102 



Nineteenth Century, 125 

Normandy, cottages of, 23; 
ducks of, 22-24; hospitality 
of, 21-22, 24, 25; peasants 
of, 23 

Northumberland Ave., London, 15 

Norton, Professor Charles Eliot, 
on Tennyson Memorial Com- 
mittee, 128 

Old Adelaide Gallery (Gatti's 
restaurant), 16 

"On Beauty" (by Blackie), 87 

"One of Our Conquerors" (Mere- 
dith), 227 

O'Reilly, John Boyle, 247 

Organic life, Kelvin's hjiiothesis 
concerning, 107 

O'Shea, Captain (divorce case 
of), 240, 248, 256 

"Ouida", 17 

"Our Boys", run of, 16 

Paget, Sir James, 53 

Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, 51 

Paris, Election at, 261, 264-266, 
271-272 

Parke (Stanley's officer), 209, 211 

Parliament Buildings, 10 

Parnell, Charies Stewart, 138, 143, 
240-274 ; characteristics, 257- 
258; eludes author, 242-245; 
elusiveness of, 242, 246; love 
affair, 256; "mystery" of, 241, 
257 ; object of, 255 ; Parliamen- 
tary leader of Irish. 241, 252, 253; 
tastes, 258; wife's book about, 
256-257 

Parnell Commission, 240 

Patti, Mme. Adelina (Baroness 
Cederstrom), 57-78 ; appreciation 
of Scalchi and Annie Louise 
Carey, 77; ancestry, 66; as a 
linguist. 61-62; care of voice. 
69-70; collection of photo- 
graphs, 75; description of, 58, 



284 



INDEX 



59, 64-65; first appearance 
before royalty, 65 ; generosity 
of, 76; gifts to, 75-76; illness, 
67; letter from Gladstone, 62- 
63; London debut at Covent 
Garden in "La Soninambxila ", 
65 ; love of theatre, 74 ; mod- 
esty of, 64, 66; proudest ex- 
perience, 63-64 ; Rothschild's 
dinner to, 63, 66; singing of, 
68, 70-71, 72, 73; tribute 
from Prince of Wales (Edward 
VII), 63-64 

Pearson, J. L., designer of Tenny- 
son Memorial, 128 

Penwylt, Wales, 57 

Phoenician remains at Weston 
Manor, 133-134 ; route to Corn- 
wall through Freshwater, 132- 
133 

"Pinafore ", run of, 16 

Pinero, Sir Arthur, 16 

Plays and players, 16 

Plunket, Baron, 186 

"Poetical Tracts" (by Blackie), 87 

Politics, author's views on, 139, 
140, 145-146, 155 

Portman Rooms, London, 216 

Poynter, Sir E. J., 52 

Prince of Wales' Theatre, 16 

Prince of Wales (Edward VII), 
tribute to Patti, 63-64 

Punch, 162, 262 

Queen Square, London, au- 

thoe's rooms rear of, 7, 8 
Queen's Hall, 16 
"Quill Club", 8 

Rachel, fame of, 185 

Ramsay, Sir William, 107; opin- 
ion of Lord Kelvin, 103-104 

Raven-Hill, L., cartoonist for 
Punch, 262; draws Boulanger, 
267, 270, 271 ; illustrated author's 
articles, 262-263; work of, 263 



Receptions, Irving's "first-night ", 
203-204 

Redmond, John, on Ireland, 250; 
power of, 253 

Regiments, dress of, 17 

Restaurants, 16 

Rice, James, 17 

Ritchie, Lady, charm of, 136- 
137; death of, 134; escape 
from German bomb, 135 ; home 
in Isle of Wight. 134-135; 
quoted, 135 ; stories of Tenny- 
son, 136 

Ritz, Hotel, 16 

Roche, Jeffrey, 247, 250; learns 
about Parnell from author, 
247-249 

Rochester, 18 

Rodin, Auguste, 30; first article 
about, 31 ; gift to the author, 
31 

Rothschild, Alfred, dinner to Patti, 
63, 66 

Rouen, 24 

Royal Academic Institute of Bel- 
fast, 99 

Royal Academy, 30 

Royal Society in London, Lord 
Kelvin's address to, 104-105 

Rubinstein, portrait of, 46 

Rumford, Count, 110 

St. Ange, Raoul de, author's 
acquaintance with, 20-27 ; 
visit to Normandy with, 20-25 

St. Boniface Down, Isle of Wight, 
120 

St. James Hall, 16 

St. James Restaurant, 16 

St. Paul's Cathedral, 10 

Sala, George Augustus, 32, 33- 
34; conversation with author, 
32-34 

Salisbury, Lord, 143, 240; mis- 
take of, 143-144; tribute to 
Lord Kelvin, 106-107 



INDEX 



285 



Sankey, Ira (revivalist), 178 ; 
tour with Moody and Drum- 
mond, 178 

Saraaate, portrait of, 46 

Savoy Hotel, 15 

Scala (theatre), 16 

Scarsdale Lodge (Kensington) , 
famous tenants of, 36 

"Scottish Songs" (by Blackie), 
87 

Separatist Cause (of Ireland), 253 

Serpentine Bridge (Hyde Park), 12 

Shaftsbury Ave., 11 

Siddons, Mrs., fame of, 185 

Sinn Feiners, 254 

"Siphon Recorder", invented by 
Lord Kelvin, 100, 101 

Smalley, George W., appeal for 
Tennyson Memorial, 128 

Smith, George Mm-ray (Brown- 
ing's publisher), 53 

"Songs and Legends of Ancient 
Greece" (by Blackie), 87 

"Songs of Religion and Life" 
(by Blaclde), 87 

Sothern, E. A., 16; homes of, 
36 ; hospitality of, 36, 37 

Spottiswoode (publisher), 53 

Stairs (Stanley's officer), 209, 211 

Stanley, Sir Henry M., 205-221; 
address at St. James Hall, 
quoted, 209-210, 211-212; 
"American dinner" to, 212-220; 
character of, 205 ; experience 
with an election crowd, 220- 
221 ; famous march into Africa, 
209, 210; member of Parlia- 
ment, 220, 221 ; portrait of, 46 ; 
quoted, 217-219, 220-221 ; 
return to London, 205-207; 
temper of, 205 ; tribute to his 
officers, 211 

Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 53 

Stephen, Leslie, 53 

Stephenson, Robert, 100 

Stepniak, description of, 49 ; meet- 



ing with Moscheles, 49 ; portrait 

of, 46 
Stoker, Bram (Irving's manager), 

189 ; handwriting of, 189 
Strand, 15 

Street cries of London, 14 
"Sublime Society of Beefsteaks", 

202 
Submarine telegraphy, 100, 101 

Talma (actor), fame of, 185 

Telephone brought to Europe, 106 ; 
installed in Lord Kelvin's house, 
106 

Temple Bar, 15 

Tennyson, Hallam (second Lord), 
son of poet, 53, 126 

Tennyson, Lord (the poet), anec- 
dotes of, 121, 122-123, 129-130, 
134, 136; brother of, 125; buried 
in Westminster Abbey, 126; 
description of, 121 ; devotion 
of son, 126; "Dirty Monk" 
photograph of, 117-118; family 
life, 126; letter in Times re- 
garding, 129-130; life at Far- 
ringford, 126 ; memorial to, 
127-129; peculiarities of, 125; 
persons who resembled him, 125 ; 
photographs of, 117-118; proud 
of his fame, 124; sincerity of, 
130; summer home of, 125 

"Tennyson's Down ", 127 

Tennyson's Lane, 115, 119, 120 

Terry, Ellen, achievements as 
actress, 198; art of, 187; at 
Irving's supper parties, 202; 
at Lyceum Theatre, 187; charm 
of, 197-198; first visit to 
America, 46 

Thames Embankment, lighting on, 
9 

"The Artist's Mother" (Whistler), 
portrait sold to France, 167 

"The Briary" (home of Watts), 
115 



286 



INDEX 



"The Greatest Thing in the 
World" (Drummond), 172, 174 

The Pilot, 247 

"The Porch", Lady Ritchie's 
home, 135 

"The Uniform Motion of Heat 
in Homogeneous Solid Bodies, 
and Its Connection With The 
Mathematical Theory of Elec- 
tricity" (by Lord Kelvin), HO 

Thomson, James, brother to Lord 
Kelvin, 98 

Thomson, James, father of Lord 
Kelvin, 98; scholarship of, 98- 
99 

Thomson, William, invented the 
"Siphon Recorder", 101; see also 
Lord Kelvin 

Times, London, quoted, 129-130 

Tottenham Court Road, 16 

Tower House, Chelsea (Whis- 
tler's home), 158, 161 

Travel, comparison of sea, 3, 
4-5 ; in London, 13-14 

Tussaud, Madame, 216, 234 

Ulster, ideals of, 253; problem 
of, 253 

Van Lorino, Moscheles' 

TEACHER, 45 

Vaudeville, the, 16 
Vaughan, Dean, 53 
Very's (restaurant), 16 
Victoria (hotel), 15 
Victoria Street (London), 11 
Victoria Tower, 12 

Walker, Robert, 131 ; theory 
regarding age of Freshwater, 
132-133 

Ward, "Ideal", in Freshwater, 
122 

Warren, Arthur, account of 
"American Dinner" given to 
Stanley, 212-220; acquaint- 



ances in Paris, 18-19; ac- 
quaintance with Henry Mur- 
ray, 6, 7, with Moscheles, 
43, 50 ; acts upon Whistler's ad- 
vice, 164 ; appointed London cor- 
respondent to Boston Herald, 
41 ; appreciation of Rodin, 30, 
31 ; arrival in London, 1-2 ; 
becomes an amateur journal- 
ist, 26-27; brings Moscheles 
and Stepniak together, 49 ; com- 
ment on artistic sensibility, 
237-238, on teetotalism. 202- 
203; day with Meredith, 223- 
238; day with John Stuart 
Blackie, 79-95 ; describes 

Browning's burial, 51-56 ; de- 
scribes early career, 28-29; de- 
sire to write, 6; dinner with 
Whistler, 160; engaged as jour- 
nalist by Boston Herald, 40-41 ; 
evenings with Henry Drum- 
mond, 170-173, 175-176, 177, 
179-181 ; experiences attend- 
ing Lyceum Theatre, 194-196; 
experience with Parnell, 242-245 ; 
first newspaper copy, 28-29, 
sees Browning, 47, sees Stanley, 
206, sees Tennyson, 121, trip to 
Paris, 18, woi-k in London, 6; 
friendship with Lady Ritchie, 
134, 135, 136, with Lord Kel- 
vin, 97, with Whistler, 157- 
164, 165-169; homes in Lon- 
don, 7, 8, 49, 157-158, 161, 
164, 222; in France, 18-27; 
interview with Boulanger, 273, 
with Monsignor Capel, 35, 37- 
38; joins Committee on Tenny- 
son Memorial, 127-128; last 
visit to Isle of Wight, 134-135; 
learning London, 7; "London 
Letters", 29, SO; makes a 
study of British municipal pol- 
icy, 176-177; meeting with 
Irving, 200-201, with George 



INDEX 



287 



Sala, 32, with John Burns, 223, 
229-234, 238, 239. with Mon- 
signor Capel, 35; memories of 
Lord Kelvin, 96-113, of father's 
burial, 56 ; native of Boston, 1 ; 
opinion of Boulanger, 268, 269, 
270, 272, 273-274, of British 
character, 196-197, of Gladstone, 
140, 141-142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 
of Irving's acting, 191, 192, 
193, 194, 199, of Parnell, 255, 
256, 257-259 ; plans articles for 
American papers, 31, 32; recol- 
lections of first three weeks in 
London, 3 ; seasickness, 4-5 ; 
sees Irving for first time, 192; 
sounds Whistler regarding 
American commission, 168-169; 
Sunday Smoke Talks at home, 
162; trip to Paris to interview 
Boulanger, 261, 263-272; views 
on Irish question, 250-257, on 
politics, 139, 140, 145-146, 155; 
visits to America, 32, 39, 41, 
160, 238, 247, to Freshwater, 
Isle of Wight, 114, 115, 118, 
136, to Normandy, 20-25, to 
Patti's home, 57-78; voyage to 
England in 1878, 3-5 

Waterloo Bridge, 12 

Waterloo Place, 12 

Watts, George Frederick, 115 

Westminster Abbey, 10, 12; 
Browning's burial in, 51—56; 
Poets' Corner in, 55; Tennyson 
buried in, 126 



Westminster Bridge, 12 

Weston Manor, Freshwater, 122; 
Phoenician remains at, 133 

Whistler, James A. McNeill, 52, 
157-169; anecdotes of, 157-160, 
102, 163, 164, 106-167; as a 
neighbour, 164, 165; called 
"butterfly with a sting", 165- 
166; champion of art, 164-165; 
characteristics of, 157, 163, 169; 
description of, 157, 163 ; dinner 
at house of, 160 ; goes to author's 
Sunday Smoke Tallcs, 161-162; 
homes of, 158, 101 ; is offered 
a commission for decoration of 
Boston Public Library, 168- 
169; moves to Paris, 169; 
portrait of Carlyle sold, 166- 
167; pursuit of Sheridan Ford, 
160-161 ; suggests decoration 
of author's flat, 164; "The 
Artist's Mother ", portrait, sold 
to France, 167 

White, Henry, American Am- 
bassador, 216-217 

White, James, manufacturer of 
instruments of precision, 100 

Whitehall, 11 

Whitehouse, 101 

Wilson, Woodrow, policy of, 138, 
156 

Wolseley, Lord, 52 

Wood, Mrs. Henry, 17 

Wores, Theodore, disciple of 
Whistler, 162 

Writers in London, 16-17 



